


The Man With the Silver Arm

by vanillafluffy



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Losers - All Media Types
Genre: AU, Betrayal, Bi-Curiosity, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Character Death, Consensual Underage Sex, F/M, Family Secrets, Hand Job, Jake Jensen is Steve Rogers' clone, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Not Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, Reach Around, Throw canon in a blender and hit 'puree'
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-03
Updated: 2017-06-17
Packaged: 2018-02-23 23:03:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 18
Words: 23,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2559011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanillafluffy/pseuds/vanillafluffy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Storing the Winter Soldier at the same facility where they were trying grow Captain America’s clone is probably not the wisest decision Hydra ever made.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Rating goes up; Jake doesn't stay 10-years old forever.

There are so many lies surrounding his birth that he doesn’t unravel them all for many years. From the time he’s a small child, he’s told his name is Jacob Jensen—there is a birth certificate to prove it. Hildy Jensen, the woman who says she’s his mother, is lying about that—she engaged in an act of industrial espionage for Hydra, stealing the genetic material that grew into Jake from a lab in Alamagordo. The man listed as his father, Alexander Pierce, is no biological relation to him either, although there’s a blond, blue-eyed resemblance between the two that makes the lie plausible.

The identity of his genetic donor remains a mystery for even longer, but at first Jake has no idea about any of it. He grows up happy and precocious in a Hydra compound near Vienna, Virginia. The world outside the compound is one he knows mainly from books. He’s kept sequestered from mainstream media and taught by various instructors who have been carefully vetted. Someday, his “father” tells him, he will be their greatest asset….

At age eight, he reads at a 12th grade level. In his tech classes, he’s learned to assemble various circuits, how to crack codes and infiltrate systems. Although he’s tall for his age, he can't quite hold his own against an incoming recruit, and Brock, his hand-to-hand instructor, says it’ll probably be a few more years and a growth spurt or two before he can improve on that. Still, his hand-eye coordination is excellent, and he can throw things with remarkable accuracy.

There is no corner of the compound that Jake is a stranger to. He blithely ignores “KEEP OUT” signs; Hydra is his birthright, they certainly don’t apply to him. 

He is ten years old when he first encounters the man in the iron mask. He’s familiar with the book by Dumas, so when he sees the man with the electronic device covering his face, Jake is fascinated. The man is in one of the labs, strapped down to a reclining table while the technicians throw switches. 

Jake knows how to be sneaky when he wants to remain unnoticed; He waits until the techs have left the room, then stealthily prowls over to look at the man on the table. The mask has been retracted, revealing shoulder-length dark hair straggling down untidily. His eyes are dark blue and blink constantly as if the light hurts them. He’s a few years older than most of the recruits Hydra gets, but younger than Jake’s mom. 

“Hey, are you okay?” Jake asks him. The man focuses on him, looking hard, as if trying to remember something familiar. “Do you want some water?”

“Water,” the man repeats, and licks his lips.

Jake takes that as a yes, finds a clean beaker in the cabinet and fills it from the tap. He holds it for the man, whose arms are still strapped down. As he drinks thirstily, Jake realizes that the man’s left arm is silvery chrome from his shoulder to his fingertips. “What happened to your arm?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” says the man when he’s finished the water. His voice is very soft, as if he doesn't use it often. “It’s always been like this.”

“Do you want to be friends?” This guy looks like he needs a friend. The techs have been so busy with all their medical stuff, he figures, that they’ve forgotten their patient is a person, too. ”My name’s Jake, what’s yours?”

His new friend looks sad. “I don’t know,” he whispers.

“Don’t worry, I’ll find out for you,” Jake reassures him. “It’ll be okay.”

The techs, when they return from their break, are disturbed to find him there. They turn a deaf ear to his questions and hustle him out of the room, but Jake doesn’t forget the blue-eyed man with the silver arm, or the promise he made to find his name. 

Jake keeps his promise. It doesn’t happen right away, and in the process, he finds out a lot of other things. He and the man in the iron mask have a lot in common, including the people who have been lying to them.

…


	2. The Coffin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake's further investigations into the mysterious man.

Jake can’t get any answers about the man with the silver arm. The techs say it’s classified, and stay silent to his queries. His mom shakes her head and says he doesn’t need to know about it, and he needs to take out the recycling now, thank you. When he broaches the subject with Brock, he gets a startled look, then Brock says, “Stay away from that guy, he’s whackadoodle. Come on, I’m gonna show you a new throw today…”.

His nameless friend isn’t in the lab again, although Jake checks whenever he’s down that way, and little by little, he turns his attention to other things. He speaks eight languages, plus several machine languages, and learns ASL. On a whim, he hacks the White House computer system, and makes a few changes, so the old people who are supposed to get cards for their 100th birthday get greetings from the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He isn’t caught, but he overhears a couple of STRIKE team guys laughing about the news.

When he turns 14, Jake actually outfights one of the younger recruits, and Brock is as pleased as Jake’s ever seen him. Brock’s opinion matters most to him—his mom always makes him feel like he’s one of her projects and she’s mentally writing up lab notes on his performance. His dad is hardly ever around—he’s got some kind of high-powered job in Washington DC, and Jake sees him maybe two or three times a year. 

He’s over near the lab one afternoon when he hears voices. Hears that quiet voice he remembers from years ago saying, _“Please, don’t—“_ Something metal clangs, there’s a pneumatic hiss, humming, then silence.

“Okay, let’s get him back into storage,” says a technician.

Jake ducks into a doorway and holds his breath. A moment later, two technicians wheel an upright box from the lab, turning away from Jake’s hiding place and steering it down the hallway. It looks like a big metal coffin, he thinks.

To his chagrin, there’s no one in the lab…so maybe that big box really was a coffin. Jake feels a stab of guilt. What if they’ve killed the nameless man? He was supposed to be getting him answers, but he hasn’t. Some friend he is.

He bolts from the lab and races down the corridor after the techs. At the T-junction at the end of the hall, he can see them in the distance, and he reviews what he knows of this sector. There are store-rooms, but no external exits, so he doesn’t have to stay on their heels. He can wait for the them to return, then track down the coffin-thing.

It’s a while before the techs come back down the hall, and to Jake’s disgust, they’re talking about some stupid TV show, not anything that will actually do him any good. 

A room at the far end of the hall has a small plaque that says “Cryostasis”, and of course, a bunch of signs about restricted access, which Jake ignores as usual. He knows the latest override code, because he makes it his business to find these things out, and slips inside.

There’s the big box, which now has a bunch of hoses and tubes attached to it, and the creepiest thing is, there’s a window on the front of it frosted with ice crystals. He can see inside, and there’s the dark-haired guy he first saw four years ago, eyes closed, a mournful expression on his face.

It’s really cold in the cryo-room. Jake knows better than to try to open the thing up then and there; he could end up doing more harm than good. There’s sure to be a procedure for thawing someone out and he’s determined to find out how. He pulls out his tablet and starts making notes. He records every serial number, every barcode on the surface of the coffin, gets plenty of pictures. One thing he knows is, Hydra believes in documentation, so somewhere there has to be a how-to manual. He just has to get his hands on it.

Jake isn’t going to abandon the man with the silver arm again.

…


	3. Night Maneuvers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To get to the mysterious man in the cryo-tank, Jake undertakes a night-time recon of the Hydra compound.
> 
>  
> 
> ... 3

It takes months to find and copy _The Manual for Cryostasis and Reactivation_. It takes even longer to understand it. Bio-sciences aren’t really Jake’s forte, he’s more of a techno-type, and he doesn’t dare ask his mom too many questions. She’s not dumb, she’s liable to figure out why he wants to know.

“Reactivation” is a lengthy and daunting process. There’s a lot of gobbledygook about perfusion and enzymes and monitoring. He checks on the cryo-tank regularly—the tell-tales are always green, which is a good thing—but he’s at a loss as to how to get the man out of it.

Jake’s not idle—nobody ever is, in Hydra—he’s improved to the point where Brock uses him to test newcomers. They’re usually quite a bit older than he is, early twenties to his going-on-fifteen, and they’re always sure he’s going to be a pushover, but it’s been a while since he’s lost a one-on-one fight, and he can even hold his own in two-on-one unless the two work together.

One morning just shy of his sixteenth birthday, he gets a notice of status change—he’s flagged the system to show any changes to the cryo-chamber—it reads “Activated”.

That’s the morning he takes apart the three guys Brock sets on him, wildly impatient for the lesson to be over so he can go to the lab and find out what’s going on. It’s like his body has put everything together all of a sudden and all he has to do it let it loose. He thrusts, kicks, strikes, holds, applies pressure—the tricks he’s been learning have jelled and become second nature—and the trio of STRIKE Force trainees are left rolling on the mats wondering what the hell hit them.

“Thanks for playing,” Jake tells them, and bolts from the gym.

Jake gets to the lab, and it’s empty. The cryo-chamber is upright in the corner, obviously empty, and there’s no sign of the man with the silver arm.

There’s a sheet of paper on one of the lab tables, and out of habit, he memorizes the subject designation: 1947AZ_JBB_USSR-remandUSA1958c/oAP:V,VA.

He’ll have to keep checking back. Maybe they’ve taken the stranger somewhere for more treatment? Maybe he can use the new code to pry more information from the system. Not knowing what’s going on really annoys him, and one way or another, he’s going to get to the bottom of it.

A few days later, his code tracker shows that the subject is scheduled for “deactivation” late that evening. So they’re going to put the guy back on ice? Not until Jake’s had a chance to touch base with him.

It’s good practice for him. Jake has to sneak out of the house, make his way across the compound, get into the research building and to the lab without detection. Optimally, get back out and home the same way, like it’s one of the super covert ops the STRIKE guys are always training for.

Getting out of the house isn’t hard at all. He says good night at the usual time, and he’s way past the age where his mom comes in to tuck him in. There are no sensors on his bedroom window, and it’s a short jump to the ground. Getting back in is either a scramble back in through the window, or if it’s late enough that Mom’s gone to bed, he can use the front door.

He knows the patrol routines, the camera placements—and the gaps—but actually being out there in the semi-darkness, flitting through the shadows—it’s a rush. He’s got on a STRIKE-issue jacket that he’d wheedled out of Brock a while back, over BDU cargo pants and boots. It’s not exactly the correct patrol uniform, but it should pass at a glance. Jake’s as tall as any of the enlisted men and after dark he hopes no one will notice how baby-faced he still is.

He knows a lot of the STRIKE personnel by sight and vice versa, so there’s a decent chance he won’t seem out of place even if he is spotted. If that happens, Jake figures he’ll sling a little bull and charm his way out of trouble. Still, it would be better _not_ to get caught. He steps lightly and avoids the cameras and motion detectors.

He gets into Research with a purloined keycard. The corridors are deserted at this hour; every booted footfall seems to echo off the cinder-block walls.. He can hear voices before he ever gets to the lab, something about fantasy football scores. Neither is the soft voice of the cryo patient.

Jake peeks around the door frame when he gets there, and stares in shock. The two techs are ignoring the man strapped to the chair, who’s shaking violently with cold or fear, he isn’t sure which. His friend’s face is a mask of silent agony, and Jake can’t stand it. 

“Hey. fellows, how’s it going?” he says, strolling into the room. It’s hard to play nonchalant when it really wants to ream them out—too bad he doesn’t have the rank insignia to pull that off. “I need to have a word with your patient.”

The man with the silver arm looks up with something like recognition, then he says, “Steve?” 

Jake feels a little pain in his heart, but keeps the tight-lipped expression on his face. “Take a break,” he growls at the technicians.

“We can’t just—“

“Believe me when I say you do not want to be here for this conversation,” Jake says, doing his best impersonation of Brock getting ready to tear into new intakes. “We’re going to discuss some highly classified matters—it wouldn’t be healthy for you to hear them. Are we clear?”

They speak at the same time: 

“But we’re supposed to—“ 

“He’s dangerous—“ 

“So am I. Now, don’t give me any shit, and I won’t report your dereliction of duty—unless Hydra has started paying good money for analyzing football stats…?”

Then they can’t get out of there fast enough, hopefully not to raise questions about his presence. If they’ve looked closely, they may have noticed that he hasn’t started shaving yet, may have realized that he’s unarmed—well, there’s no use worrying. He’d better make use of the time he has….

“Steve?”

“No, I’m Jake.”

“Jake…water?” says the patient tentatively. 

After making do with a lab beaker during their first meeting, he's prepared. Jake pulls a sports bottle of water out of the pocket of his cargos and holds it to the older man’s mouth. He knows about the dangers of dehydration from his survival classes, and it’s pretty clear to him that the patient is in bad shape. It takes him less than a minute to suck down the whole 20 oz bottle.

“Do you remember your name?” he asks the man. It's too soon to give him more water, and he's waited a long time for a chance to talk with him.

Downcast eyes and a shake of the shaggy head. “Nyet,” the man mutters.

Russian is one of Jake’s learned languages. “Why do they freeze you?” he asks, careful with his translation.

“So I don’t get old. So my skills don’t degrade. Because they can.” The last is said with a sad attempt at a smile, as if this is how things have to be and he accepts that.

“What skills do you have?” Jake asks, because he can’t imagine what the guy could do that would warrant this kind of half-life.

“I am assassin for Hydra,” his friend says matter-of-factly. “All over the world, for many years, I serve Hydra by retiring their enemies.”

Hydra _kills_ people? Jake knows they offer security services and furnish privatized militia around the globe, but assassinations? “Do you like doing that?”

“I serve Hydra,” the silver-armed assassin says, like he knows it’s the right answer, whatever the question was. 

“Okay, I understand that. But is that what you want to do?”

A blink, and the man whispers, “I want to go home, Steve. I just want to go home.”

“I’m Jake,” he says, feeling helpless.

A frown of concentration. “There was a little boy named Jake…”.

“That was me. That was…five or six years ago.”

The man nods, hair hanging in his face. “I watch people grow old when I wake…they have life, I have only cold. And missions. Hail, Hydra.” The last comes out as a plea, as if all he wants is approval.

From his lessons, Jake is familiar with the concept of Stockholm Syndrome, but this is the first time he’s really grasped it. How many years has this guy been in the deep freeze? Wasn’t one of the dates on the data sheet he saw 194-something? 195-something? All this time, Hydra’s been using him to do their dirty work—he probably doesn’t even have a home to go back to anymore—that’s so long ago, his family is probably all dead.

“I’ll get you out. I don’t know how, but I will, I promise.”

He finds a blanket in one of the cupboards and tucks it around the nameless man, who smiles gratefully. He seems so passive, Jake finds it hard to believe he’s really a killer. If it’s a lie, though, it’s a bizarre one—it’s so crazy, it _has_ has to be true. 

He brings more water and asks more questions. The shiny prosthetic fascinates him. The self-confessed assassin explains the function of the interlocking plates—there are sensor pads under each of them, providing feedback. It isn’t the same as a real arm, but it helps discern contact with externals, provides thermal readings, and is stronger than flesh and bone could ever be.

He doesn’t dare unstrap the man in case he really is dangerous; it’s one thing to fight green recruits, another to take on a grown man who admits to killing people. And if it’s true that Hydra has a master assassin to deploy as needed, then Jake is in possession of a very dangerous secret.

Jake reluctantly leaves when the techs return a half-hour later. He reiterates the need for absolute secrecy. doing his best to come across as menacing. A successful evening, he thinks: he hasn’t been caught, he’s pretty sure the techs aren’t going to talk, and now he’s got a mission of his own, to free Hydra’s assassin from his wretched existence. He strides away down the corridor, hearing the relentless mechanical noises cutting short the pitiful pleas of the man with the silver arm.


	4. Wait, What?!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake's mom has her suspicions about what he's been up to late at night, which leads to Jake being suspicious about his sudden popularity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rating has gone up, see cautions.

Jake breathes easier when he gets back to his house without incident. The next morning, though, as he’s consuming his breakfast smoothie, his mother asks, “Where were you last night?”

He gives her his best blue-eyed innocent look. “What do you mean?”

“Last night, you came in at 12:58 A.M.. I’d like to know where you were.”

“Just…out. What, a guy can’t go for a walk to think about things?”

His mom’s dark brows are slanted at the angle that says she’s not buying his charm for a minute, and her nose is wrinkled like she can actually smell bullshit. “A walk with who?” she persists.

“No one!” he protests. “I just wanted some fresh air.”

“Was it one of the men from STRIKE?” 

“What? No, Mom, it was just me.”

“Because at your age, your hormones are all running rampant, and your judgment isn’t mature. It may seem exciting, but you should really wait a couple more years before you start experimenting with sex. I know there aren’t any girls your age around here, which is another good reason for you to wait.”

His smoothie goes down the wrong way, and Jake coughs so hard he thinks his throat is going to explode. “You think I’m _gay_?!”

“It could be an advantage for you to be bisexual,” she says, and while he’s trying to puzzle _that_ one out, “but don’t jump into anything hasty.”

When he’s got his breathing under control, Jake says firmly. “Thanks, Mom, but I’m not gay and I’m not fooling around with anybody. I just went for a walk. Really.”

She nods. “If you say so.”

The only female he comes into regular contact with who’s anywhere near his age is Jeanne Stravinsky in the Motor Pool; she’s been teaching him to drive and showing him some of the finer points of auto mechanics—like hot-wiring an ignition and various ways to sabotage a vehicle. Just somebody he can learn a few tricks from.

She’s mid-twenties, not gorgeous, but not a troll, either. Her light brown hair is cut in a chin-length bob, she has freckles and hazel eyes and a slight Southern accent. Jake’s never really thought about her as a _girl_ , since she’s usually wearing cover-alls and a ball cap on backwards, but a few weeks later, four days after his 16th birthday, she makes him an offer that involves the backseat.

Asking her if his mom put her up to it would be insulting for both of them. “You know I’m 16, right? You could get into trouble.”

“Only if you tell them, hon,” she replies, tousling his hair. “Aren’t you curious what it’s all about?”

Okay, that’s embarrassing. “What makes you think I don’t already know what it’s all about?” he retorts.

“Prove it.” 

Umm…okay, he walked into that one. “Fine, I will. But this place is too public and you’re supposed to be on duty. Where’s your barracks?”

“I’m right across the road in G-106. I’m off duty at 1800 hours.”

“Take a shower when you get in, and I’ll see you at 1830.”

Thank god he has a class on his schedule so he can duck out of there at 1400. He’s not adverse to getting it on with Jeanne, but he’s got to come across as experienced—and at this point, his experience has all been with online porn…which isn’t the same thing. Maybe he should review? Although it looks easy enough….

By the time he knocks on Jeanne’s door, Jake’s reviewed technique from multiple sources, practiced some more in the shower, and he’s fairly sure that he’s taken enough of the edge off that he won’t disgrace himself.

Jeanne’s ready to take charge, but he’s stubborn enough to veto her suggestion that she be on top. Jake takes his time, getting her worked up before he finally does the deed, and he’s surprised and relieved to find that while it really is damn good, he’s not out of control.

“You were right, I was wrong,” she drawls afterward. “That was amazing. Hell, I know guys my age that can’t last that long.”

Jake grins. “It was a pleasure.”

Barely a week after his romp with Jeanne, one of the STRIKE recruits propositions him. This is either a set-up, or everybody’s been waiting for him to turn Sweet 16. Private Gentry starts by complimenting him on thrashing those three guys at once, says it was fierce, and he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it.

At first, Jake thinks he’s on the level. “Oh, that? I’ve been taking classes in hand-to-hand with Brock since I was six, I’ve kinda got a head-start on you guys.”

Gentry moves a little closer. “I sure would like it if you could show _me_ some of your moves….”

He catches on then, but his curiosity is running a distant second to caution. Maybe Gentry is really interested in him, or it could be a test to see what he’ll do. Jake’s polite and says, “Thanks, but no thanks. Nothing personal.”

“How do you know you wouldn’t like it?” the young man asks—he’s breathing heavily at the thought of it.

Nope, he’s not going to fall into that trap again. “I’m pretty sure Brock Rumlow wouldn’t like it,” he parries.

“Wait, you mean you and Rumlow—?” The guy gapes at him, and Jake wonders if it wouldn’t just be easier to rough him up to get him off his case. Nah, that would be over-reacting—or even worse, the guy might enjoy it and he’d _never_ get rid of him.

He takes a deep breath and spells it out. “I don’t think your commanding officer would like to know that his recruit was hitting on a same-sex minor.”

The guy’s _Oh shit!_ look is priceless. Jake walks off, smiling.


	5. Return of the Man in the Iron Mask

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake's plans to revive The Winter Soldier are thwarted.

5 …

Jake doesn’t forget the task he’s set himself, to free the man in the cryo-tank. He’s collected the chemicals he needs, memorized the reactivation manual, he’s checked the schedule for a night when no one’s going to be in the building. His mom has a major departmental report due the next day, so he should have a clear window of opportunity. He’s planned an escape route and assembled supplies for the fugitive. As long as he puts the cryo-tank back into storage, it might be weeks or months until anyone notices the guy is gone. 

He’s pretty sure he’s thought of everything, and he goes in on the predetermined evening and gets to work. The tank still looks like a coffin to him. He’s maneuvered it from storage to the lab, he’s got the tubes hooked up to vent the anesthetics and introduce the correct revitalizers, when the lab door slams open.

It’s his dad. And Brock. And four veteran guys from STRIKE he’s known forever, and he’s pretty sure he can’t kick any of their asses. And two techs, not the same two as last time, thank god, or his goose really would be cooked. _Shit._ He takes a deep breath and prepares to bullshit for all he’s worth, but he doesn’t get a chance.

“What do you think you’re doing?” his dad demands, and backhands him. Jake drops the hypo-spray, which unleashes a blast of esoteric chemicals across the linoleum. He hardly ever even sees his dad, and he’s never in his life seen him this angry. “Answer me!”

“You hit me!” Jake’s head is spinning, and he fights the urge to hit back.

Brock tries to intervene. “Mr. Pierce—“

“Stay out of this, Rumlow,” his dad says. “Son, you don’t know what you’re doing. This man is very dangerous. He’s mentally unstable. If you did successfully revive him, he could have hurt or killed you, and—“ He takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry I hit you, but you scared the hell out of me.” He indicates the cryo-tank to the techs. “Secure him.”

Of all the times for his dad to show up out of the blue, why tonight? Why, when he was so close to being able to help the man who’s helpless to free himself? Jake is heartsick.

After Brock and the STRIKE guys are dismissed, Jake and his dad walk home together. It’s been a couple years since Jake’s seen his dad in person instead of just Skyping, and he’s startled to realized they’re the same height—and his mom says he’s got a few inches left to grow.

“Jake, I know you’re naturally curious, and you’ve obviously developed your mom’s knack for tinkering in the lab, and that’s great. But you’re not going to be a lab rat like her, you’re destined for bigger things—someday soon, you’re going to be Hydra’s biggest asset.” 

Dad’s in charge of Hydra—does he mean he expects Jake to take over some day, and order assassinations and keep people on ice? Because that sounds terrible. Taking over for Brock, maybe—he likes fighting and using weapons and sneaking around—but this “asset” business worries him.

“That man in the lab—who was he? What’s his name? Why is he frozen?” 

After years of looking up to the man, all Jake can think as Dad hesitates is, What lie am I going to hear now? Getting hit like that has knocked a big hole in his trust of the man—if he’d just said ‘Stop!’, Jake would have stopped. 

“I told you, son—he’s dangerous. He’s been frozen since longer than I’ve been with Hydra—a very long time—because he’s erratic. Unfortunately, he also has a lot of classified information in that twisted head of his, so we can’t just lock him up. He was Spetnatz Special Forces, and no ordinary stockade could hold him.”

It sounds plausible. And it might be part of the truth. But Jake remembers the man’s quiet voice and cowed demeanor, and he doesn’t _quite_ believe it.

“What’s his name?”

“We refer to him as ‘The Winter Soldier’. I know, it sounds very melodramatic, doesn’t it? He was a Soviet operative, but we’ve had him in custody for the last fifty years.”

He remembers what the man said about watching people grow older every time he awoke. More than fifty years? Jake can’t imagine it, but he has to admit it fits with what he knows. “Doesn’t he have a name?”

“He doesn’t need a name.” He really is like the man in the iron mask, Jake thinks, recalling his first impression all those years ago. “But that’s not important, son. I wanted to come by and see how you’re doing. You’re 16 now, that’s a big deal.”

Since when? Dad’s sent gifts for birthdays and holidays, but he’s rarely showed up for them. Which only makes his timing of this visit more infuriating. 

They’re strolling down the street toward Jake’s house, when he sees the flashy new muscle car parked in the driveway, and figures that stopping in for a visit was an excuse for a road trip. “Gee, Dad—mid-life crisis much?”

His father chuckles. He takes a ring of keys from his pocket and jingles them in front of Jake. “Happy birthday, Jake. I hear you’ve learned to drive.” There’s a knowing undertone to his words, and he figures Jeanne told somebody something, even if she wasn’t put up to seducing him.

“That’s right.” He hopes his blush isn’t too obvious in the dim light. “That’s awesome, Dad—thanks.”

He gets a pat on the back as they go into the house, but Jake still feels uneasy. Coming on the heels of his unsuccessful rescue, the car is definitely too good to be true.


	6. Who's Your Daddy?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eavesdropping, Jake discovers a shocking secret.

6 …

If his dad is suspiciously mellow, his mom is definitely acting normal—she gives Jake 57 varieties of shit for sneaking out again, for venturing into a restricted area, and just when he thinks she’s winding down, she _really_ goes off about tampering with classified materials. Which is a hell of a way to refer to the poor bastard who’s been getting frozen and defrosted since poodle-skirts roamed the earth, but this isn’t the time to bring it up.

“And _you’re_ rewarding him with a car?” She turns on his dad when she’s run out of steam for his misdeeds, and Jake escapes to his bedroom.

His mom may be a genius in her field—some kind of bio research that’s so esoteric he’s never quite figured out what it is she does—but she’s not outstandingly computer literate. For instance, she has no clue that Jake’s jacked the audio feed on her laptop, which mostly comes in handy to listen to her phone conversations. He brings it up on his tablet, puts in his earbuds and gets an earful of what his folks are really up to.

“—waltz in here and play the hero and make me out to be the villain,” Mom is saying. “You’ve got it easy, I’m the one doing all the heavy lifting!”

_Wow, thanks, Mom. Way to make a guy feel all warm and fuzzy._

“You’ve done a wonderful job, Hildy,” his dad says soothingly. “I’m really impressed by how well Jake is progressing. Rumlow says he’s exceeding all expectations in his tactical skills classes, Klaus tells me the kid’s brilliant with electronics, and episodes like tonight are something we want to encourage—under the right circumstances.”

“Why can’t you groom him for _your_ job, Alex? After everything I’ve gone through to get him this far, you want him to take over as the asset?”

Okay, so clearly, he’s not in line for his dad’s job any time soon, which is good. But what does she mean, “take over” as the asset? Jake is beginning to have the feeling that whatever they have in store for him isn’t exactly the honor his dad’s always made it sound like.

“That was the whole point, remember? With all the planning, and the set-up, we’ve spent eighteen years working toward that end game, and I’m not about to call it off because you’re having some sentimental maternal qualms!”

“Sentiment, my ass!” There’s a bang, as if his mother has smacked the table or the wall. “You’re being short-sighted! Yes, he’s smart and strong—we knew he had incredible potential from the beginning! So why limit ourselves to just one? If we had redundancies—“ 

“I’ve told you why every time you’ve brought it up, Hildegard—it’s better to have one perfect operative than a dozen mediocre ones.”

For a minute, it sounded they were talking about having more kids, but no…and they’re planning for him to be an operative? Like ‘asset’, it’s sounding sketchier by the minute.

Then his mother snaps, “You wouldn’t even have one clone if it wasn’t for me!”

“Keep your voice down!” The pickups go quiet.

Jake can’t breathe for a moment. A clone? He’s a clone? And all this time, they’ve been training him to be their asset, their operative, and he’s really not even their son…?

There’s a knock at his bedroom door, and his dad looks in at him. No, not his dad…Jake blinks at him, and his not-dad taps his ear. 

Jake pulls out the earbuds. “What’s up?” he asks, feeling nauseous, but he can play clueless like a pro.

“Just wanted to let you know I’m taking off in a little bit. Rumlow’s coming by to pick me up, he’s going to run me back to the city.” He’s smiling, all movie-star good looks charisma—and it’s a filthy lie.

_There’s not one drop of that guy’s blood in my veins, but he thinks he owns me. Bullshit. I’m going to get the hell out of here, and take his pet assassin with me._ “Okay. Thanks again for the car, it’s amazing.”

Alexander Pierce winks at him and closes the door. The earbuds go back in. “Lucky for you, he had his headphones on,” he hears.

“Look, in just a few years, he’ll be old enough so we can run a comparative baseline against the donor’s profile—“ 

“Which wouldn’t really tell us anything,” his not-dad tells her. “Either he’ll be successful or he won’t, but either way, I’m not going to have him languish as your guinea pig when he could make significant contributions to the organization. I’m going to discuss intensifying his training with Rumlow; by the time he’s eighteen, I want him ready.”

Jake half-listens to their bickering. He doesn’t learn anything more shocking that the clone revelation—he knows already Alexander and Hildegard have never been married, but apparently they’re never been intimate, either. They’re on the record as his parents for purposes of custody, but neither of them seems to have feelings for him beyond wanting him to succeed in whatever it is he’s being groomed for. 

So who the hell is his ‘donor’? That’s the big question. He’d be identical to the guy, but Jake’s never seen anyone around the compound that looks like him.

Hildy divulges she got the genetic material at some risk to herself, so it could have come from anywhere. She mentions Alamogordo: Jake knows that’s where she worked before signing on with Hydra and moving to the East Coast. Is the donor there? Is he still alive? Why had he been such a desirable specimen? What ‘incredible potential’ do they expect him to fulfill? How is he supposed to become their ‘asset’?

The questions swirl around in his head until long after Alex has departed and Hildy has gone to bed. Jake sleeps eventually, but his dreams are troubled.


	7. Intro to the Art of War

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake is supposed to be studying "The Art of War" and he's trying to figure out how to apply it to his situation. How can he use Hydra's strength against itself?

7 …

When he reports to Rumlow the next day for training, there’s no mention of last night’s lab confrontation. His instructor is as genial as always, and compliments Jake on his new wheels. Jake gets a chance to drive, too, because Brock guides him out to Hydra’s artillery range for today’s lesson.

In broad daylight, the car is even flashier than it looked under the streetlights. It’s royal blue with red pin-striping and red leather interior…not exactly subtle. Again, Jake wonders if his not-dad is having a mid-life crisis—or does he think this is what a teenager would want? Or maybe he wants something distinctive in case he ever needs to put out an APB on it. Jake’s already swept the car for tracking—of course they’ve got him lo-jacked—but that should be easy enough to circumvent when he needs to.

Jake’s proficient with small arms and standard equipment, but when Brock pulls out a grenade launcher, that’s a whole ‘nother thing. He’s attentive to the accompanying lecture, and when Brock demonstrates it by blowing up a 55-gallon drum, Jake whoops at the boom.

Actually getting to use it himself is fantastic. There’s more of a recoil than anything he’s used up to this point. The concussion of the grenade when it goes off—even though he misses the drum he’s supposed to be aiming at by a couple yards—it’s exhilarating. His second shot blows the barrel to shrapnel, and by the end of the lesson, he’s nailing what he aims at consistently.

“Good work, Jake,” Brock tells him as they saunter back to the parking lot. “Wait til we get to mortars and rocket launchers, you’re gonna love that.”

He’s already loving it. He’s trying to play it cool, but blowing shit up has him really turned on, and since Mom’s at work, he plans to run home and take care of that.

“Here,” says Brock when Jake drops him back off at his office, and hands him a book—it’s Sun Tzu’s _The Art of War_. “Read up on this, we’re going to be discussing tactics pretty soon.”

He doesn’t get around to _The Art of War_ right away. He’s been rereading an old favorite, _Huckleberry Finn_ , and identifying with it more than he ever did before. Now he’s the guy whose dad is an asshole that he wants to get away from and the cryo-prisoner is Hydra’s slave…somehow, they have to escape from their current entrapment and make a new life.

When Jake finally picks up _The Art of War_ a couple days later, it’s slow going. How can he apply it to his own situation, is what he wants to know. Things like “If your enemy is greater in number, avoid them”—well no shit. First he has to figure out how to get away from them, and take one well-guarded alleged assassin with him, and that isn’t in the damn book.

“Use your enemy’s strength against them.” Yeah, terrific. How the hell is he supposed to do that? Hydra is a huge organization, and there’s only one of him. Granted, he knows how they work, but how can he made that work for him?

_Think, Jake_ , he tells himself. _What’s my advantage?_

_There’s only one of me. I don’t have to go through channels…channels…Hydra has lots of channels, all kinds of bureaucracy…can I use_ that _against them?_

Slowly, Jake begins to grin.

Brock is more than happy to sign off on him getting manuals for the equipment he’s been using, the grenade launcher, the rocket launcher and the mortars. (Totally sweet, btw. Even sexier than the grenade launcher—bigger booms, yay!) He doesn’t really need them, but that gives him an excuse to be over in Admin during a work day, because he figures after being caught in the lab, they’ll have their eyes on him and skulking around at oh-dark-thirty isn’t gonna work for him anymore.

He’s been working on a jammer for the surveillance systems—it’ll slow the camera tracking briefly, allowing him to evade it without being too obvious—and he’s got the device with him when he goes after the manuals. From there, it’s a simple matter of going left instead of right on his way out, and sneaking into the executive conference room adjoining his not-dad’s office. 

The conference room connects to Pierce’s office via a small service room. There’s a coffeemaker, microwave, sink and miscellaneous office supplies on shelves leading to a door behind Pierce’s desk.

He’s in luck; the door to the outer office where the administrative assistant sits is mostly closed; there’s a narrow wedge of light, and Jake can hear the murmur of her voice on the phone.

This is the first time he’s ever tried to hack Hydra. He’s learned a lot about their defenses over the years, but there’s always the chance there’s some safeguard in the system he _doesn’t_ know about. 

His first attempt to log in as Pierce fails. Damn. He only has three chances, then the system will lock him out and all hell will break loose.

He tries again, and gets “Password does not match User ID. 2/3”

Jake’s heart is hammering. Okay, he’s got the User ID right. The password…he thinks about how often the system prompts the user to change the password. Thinks about how long he’s had the password…if the last number in the sequence is the current month…. Once more he tries the password, typing each digit with extreme care and changing 0-1 to 0-6…hits “Enter”—

“Welcome, Alexander Pierce”

Jake does a silent fist pump and brings up the ultra-classified files. He plugs in a flash drive and copies all the files that come up for the search “Winter Soldier”. There are several; he downloads them all. He searches for references to himself. There are only two, one with his name on it, and one cross-referenced to Hildegard Jensen. He snags those and tucks the drive into his pocket.

He’s so absorbed in logging out of the system that he almost doesn’t register the assistant saying, “He isn’t in today, but I’ll put it on his desk so he’ll see it the next time he’s in—“ 

The narrow wedge of door widens, and Jake dives under the desk, grabbing the chair so its motion won’t give him away.

There’s another voice in the outer office saying something, and the assistant says, “Oh, well, in that case, I can have it couriered to him. He’ll get it this evening or tomorrow, depending on his schedule.”

Jake stays frozen in the knee-well until he hears the assistant taking another call. Very carefully, he eases the chair back from the desk and peeks toward the door. He can clearly see the woman’s back as she goes about her duties. And if he can see her, she’ll be able to see him if she turns around while he’s getting into the service room—or anyone who comes in to talk to her will if they’re standing in front of her desk.

He can’t stay here; she’s liable to come in for something else and find him. Slowly, he stands up and guides the chair back into place. Three steps backward to the door. He has his hand on the knob when the assistant looks up and to her left, greeting someone who’s entered her office. He has a couple of seconds grace, no more.

Jake moves fast then, pulling open the door and ducking inside. He has enough presence of mind not to slam it behind him. He eases it the last two inches until the latch catches, then he heaves a huge sigh.

His manuals are still on the table in the conference room, and he grabs them on the way out. He remembers to check the corridor before exiting, and he only has to use the jammer once to get out of the building. All things considered, he thinks as he jogs out to the parking lot, he’s getting pretty good at this clandestine shit.

His file is a disappointment. There are various fitness reports from Hildy and his instructors, but nothing that gives any clue to his real parentage. The only thing mentioned in Hildy’s file is a “sample” that was “extracted” from Alamogordo. That has to be it, but it’s only referred to as SGR_070418-041442. Go back to Pierce’s office and try again? That would be pushing his luck.

The Winter Soldier files, on the other hand, are highly comprehensive. There’s a scan of some very old documents—handwritten, most of them, in what looks like German. He also recognizes Cyrillic—but they’re so fuzzy, he gets a headache trying to decipher them. An even larger file has them scanned via OCR, but the originals are so bad it’s all alphabet soup. He gives up on them and opens what turns out to be blueprints for the Soldier’s cybernetic arm.

It’s intricate, and Jake studies it with admiration. Uh-huh, there’s a tracking chip, not really a surprise, but now that he knows, he can disconnect it. There’s another unit that furrows his brow. “Reservoir”? “Delivery system”? Then he realizes it’s a hypodermic of some kind—they’re either drugging the guy, or it’s something to knock him out if he goes postal. That _definitely_ needs to come out.

Then he hits the jackpot. There’s actually an operating manual for the Winter Soldier. It lists protocols and contingencies, lists keywords, spells out everything necessary to keep Hydra’s “Asset” in line. That’s how they refer to him: The Asset.

Confirmation that this is what Pierce means when he talks about Jake becoming their Asset makes him clench his fists. Yes, he’s been taking lessons in fighting since he was a little kid. Yes, he’s proficient in firearms, and rapidly gaining competence in heavier artillery. And for what? So he can be their killer? And what are they going to do with their current Asset? Put him on ice forever? Have Jake off him as a final exam? He’s highly pissed and more than a little disgusted. 

Closing that file, he goes back to the scanned documents, and discovers as he tabs through them that the German and Russian records give way to English beginning in 1958 when Hydra obtained him from the Soviet bloc. Thankfully, the originals were typed so the scanned versions aren’t too hard to read.

Easier to read, but no easier to stomach: There are details of missions: assassinations of world leaders, assaults on “enemy” bases, outright massacres of so-called “hostile” populations. Jake feels even queasier when he gets to the part about seduction and torture—sometimes both, depending on how stubborn the target is—of both men and women.

Was _that_ what Hildy had meant about it being an advantage for him to be bisexual? So he could fuck people before fucking them up? 

Jake puts the flash drive into his pocket. He doesn’t dare leave it lying around, and he doesn’t want to be here when Hildy comes home, because he doesn’t think he can fake normal under the circumstances.

Good thing he’s got a car. He needs to get out of here for a while.


	8. Prospects

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake runs into an old acquaintance and develops plans.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Opinions expressed by the characters are not necessarily those of the author.

8…

 

Jake drives for half an hour…he doesn’t have a destination in mind; he just needs to get away from the Hydra compound, needs to _think_. He finally pulls in at a diner off the beaten track, figuring lunch might help him in his ruminations. 

He waits for his order, trying to assess his options. Originally, his intention was to get the Winter Soldier—there has to be a better name for the poor guy—out of Hydra and away. Then, when he’d learned his own dirty little secret, he’d planned that they’d both leave and go their own ways once they’re safely gone. 

Having seen the Asset’s “User’s Manual”, though, he knows that won’t work. Letting the guy go off on his own…Hydra has him so brainwashed he’d never make it. They’d catch up with him, say one of those code words and he’d go obediently back with them…no, Jake’s going to have to stay with him long enough to break that conditioning before the guy can have any kind of life. 

Okay, first he needs to read up on how to do that kind of thing, Of course, that still leaves the question of how he’s going to get his partner in adversity thawed out so they can escape. After they get away…what then? Where will they go, how will they get by? They’ll need fake IDs, cover identities…it’s going to be complicated.

“You want the usual, hon?” the waitress asks, and Jake hears a semi-familiar voice answer, “Sounds good, Carolyn.” 

Gentry stands at the counter. He glances toward the tables, recognizes Jake and looks surprised. It has to be coincidence, because he and the waitress seems to know each other, and Jake had had no idea he’d end up here. What the hell, he may as well be friendly. He inclines his head toward the seat opposite, and Gentry ambles over and sits.

“I guess you heard, I washed out of training,” he says after a few minutes of small-talk.

“No, they don’t tell me stuff ;like that,” Jake replies. “I’m sorry.” He’s not, really, because Gentry seems like an okay guy, and Hydra is no place for someone like that. “Are you going to try to get into the army now?”

“Well, I might—but I’ve got an application in with SHIELD, I want to try them first.”

SHIELD is Hydra’s biggest competition in privatized enforcement, Jake knows. He’s been hearing disparaging comments about them all his life. Now he wonders if they’re earned, or if it’s sour grapes on Hydra’s part.

The waitress brings their orders at the same time, and they devour burgers and fries and cokes, chatting about sports and guns and movies, everyday stuff. It isn’t until Carolyn brings their checks over that Gentry says, “Look, I wanted to apologize for hitting on you that time. I thought you were older.”

“Okay…but why did you? Do I come across as gay?” Jake’s been wondering that for weeks, and he regards Gentry with what he hopes is a neutral expression.

“No—I mean, you’re not swishy or anything like that, it’s just…you seem to be really comfortable in your own skin. Like,” Gentry seems to be sorting through what he wants to say while Jake waits, “with all those older guys, you weren’t intimidated at all. Even Brock, and I thought he was a scary, scary guy.”

Jake shrugs. “I’ve known him pretty much all my life.” _And spent about ten thousand percent more time with him than my own father—or not-father, as the case may be._

“But you were comfortable with all that, and you moved like a force of nature and I never saw anything like the way you wiped those guys out,” Gentry’s being perfectly sincere, and Jake thinks he might be blushing. “And I thought, well, maybe we’ll just spar, or you might get pissed and I’d get my ass handed to me, but I _had_ to ask because who knows, I _could_ get lucky.”

“That’s cool. There’s nothing wrong with that,” he hastens to add, “it’s just not anything I’ve tried...yet.”

“Maybe I should give you my number so you can look me up when you’re eighteen,” Gentry jokes.

It’s not the worst idea, cultivating a friend who isn't part of Hydra. “Why not? We could always go hit a movie sometime, grab a burger, whatever…I don’t have to be eighteen for that.”

That earns him a big smile. Gentry’s not bad looking—clean-cut, earnest—and Jake figures that he could do worse for someone to explore his bi-curiosity with. He isn’t averse to trying it with a guy, but he has no intention of doing it to satisfy Hydra. Jake can arrange that for whenever he’s ready; it isn’t like his new pal knows exactly _when_ his birthday is.

Heading back to the compound, Jake feels calmer. The prospect of getting it on with Gentry intrigues him, but more than that, something else is nudging him: SHIELD. Granted, he’d have to dummy-up some kind of cover persona, credentials, shit like that—but his skill set…if it’s good enough for Hydra, it ought to work as well for their competition. Gentry said Jake doesn’t seem like a kid, so he should be able to pull off an older identity, say someone who’s out of college and ready to enter the workforce.

It’s something else to think about, but there’s something he has to take care of before he can start making his mark on the world. Deprogramming the current Asset comes first…which brings up the issue of how to get the Winter Soldier released from cryo-stasis. That’s one problem old Sun-Tzu never encountered.

It dawns on him a few miles from home, and he starts laughing so hard he has to pull off the road. Sun-Tzu might not have known the first thing about hacking, unless it was with a sword, but he has the answer: Use Hydra’s protocols against itself, like he did today. He can hack the system to originate an order for the Soldier to be revived by technicians, then go in and take over as his “handler”.

Yeah. That’ll work. There’s just a lot of other shit he has to have in place before he can do that….

...


	9. Advanced Studies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As his Hydra mentors push him toward the goal of becoming the new Asset, Jake finds himself in conflict with the one person he's always trusted.

Jake is feeling good. He’s just finished what’s become the standard intro to Hydra’s hand-to-hand combat course, the one where he takes on four guys at a time…he can’t even remember the last time he got beat—it’s been a year or so. Brock is standing there giving the new intakes his usual speech about not underestimating one’s opponent, and Jake lets is mind wander to his plans.

He’s been polishing his hacking chops by creating new files in the Bureau of Vital Statistics, the Department of Motor Vehicles, several banks, assorted school transcripts, including a shiny new diploma for himself from MIT. It’s under his new cover identity of Steven Finnegan. Finnegan in honor of Huck Finn, and Steven because his newly-invented brother should be able to remember it. His ‘brother’ is James, in honor of Huck’s companion Jim—although he hasn’t been informed of the fact yet, because Jake’s laying low and staying away from the labs until D-Day.

At this point, he’s trying to figure out where they’re going to stay during Jim’s deprogramming… according to his studies on the topic, those will take some time. They’ll need somewhere isolated, to be safe in the process. He needs to find it soon, because his 18th birthday is just eight months away.

Too bad Gentry’s in the Army now, because he might have—

He’s completely tuned out Brock Rumlow, which is a mistake, because he barely sees the blur of motion before the fist slams into his abdomen, doubling him over. He’s still gulping for air when another punch impacts his cheekbone, knocking him backward onto the floor—he bangs his head against the hardwood hard enough to see stars. Just when he starts to hope the onslaught is over, a booted foot nails him squarely in the groin.

Jake retches.

“Just so you know, no one is invincible,” Rumlow is saying to the recruits when Jake can hear him again or the sound of his own agony. “Anybody can be beaten, we’ve just demonstrated that. Not only will age and treachery overcome youth and skill, but not paying attention can get you seriously fucked up or killed. Letting your guard down, no matter how well you think you know someone, is dangerous.”

This is supposed to be as much a lesson for him as for the intakes, Jake realizes through his misery. If he had a little more strength at the moment, he’d be acutely pissed.

“Get up, Jake.”

Jake looks at the extended hand and scuttles backward like a crab. Every ache protests, especially his crotch, but he gets enough distance away to scramble up, never taking his eyes off Rumlow.

“Dismissed,” Rumlow says under his breath.

He’s supposed to turn his back and leave the gym? Nope. He stands facing his former mentor. Holding his ground is all the dignity Jake has right now. He won’t appear to give up and retreat that easily, he won’t.

Still maintaining eye contact, Jake takes the biggest breath he can. Hardening his stomach muscles to support his diaphragm, he says to the tiers of intakes behind Rumlow, “And no matter how good a man is, numbers will bring him down. If you all dog-pile on him right now, you can take him.”

There’s enough command in his tone that a few of the recruits actually stand up, then a few more. At the shuffling of feet, Rumlow half-turns to view the stands. 

“Sit down, you idiots!” he roars.

“You can’t take them all, can you?” Jake asks. “Hell, I can’t even remember the last time I saw you take on two against one, let alone four.”

Rumlow doesn’t like that at all, but it’s true. 

“Are you all going to sit there?” Jake demands. “Rush him!”

Rumlow turns to quell the incipient insurrection. Jake could get away, but anger has kicked in, a cold rage that wants to punish the other man for his betrayal. He moves closer. When something—probably eager looks from the recruits—cause Rumlow to turn back, his nose plows right into Jake’s fist.

Breaking a guy’s nose will definitely make him close his eyes for a moment, no matter how well-disciplined he is. When he does, Jake gets in a powerhouse kick to his mid-section—likely cracks a couple of ribs—Rumlow staggers backward and goes down.

Without the slightest qualm, Jake delivers the coup-de-gras. Rumlow’s breakfast reappears, and he curls into a fetal position on the hardwood.

Making sure that he’s out of range just in case the man is playing possum, Jake keeps Rumlow in his peripheral vision as he addresses the intakes. “That, gentlemen, was a demonstration of a little principle known as, ‘Two can play at that game’. Thank you. Dismissed!”

The recruits disperse, not even questioning Jake’s authority, and despitehis various hurts—that kick had been quite a jolt to the jewels—Jake feels a sense of satisfaction.

“Go ahead,” Rumlow wheezes when they’re alone in the gym. “Finish me off.” He’s a sorry-looking sight with the blood from his nose oozing down his face, dripping onto his shirt and the floor. Still, Jake doesn’t trust him not to be over-playing his incapacity to lure him in.

“Nah, too easy,” Jake says, trying to sound amused. “When I do kick your ass, you’re not going to see it coming.”

Rumlow shifts gingerly, managing to sit up., “You know, that wasn’t personal.”

It felt personal. It felt like betrayal by the last person at Hydra he’d cared about. Cutting ties has just become that much easier. 

“Oh, I think I’ve learned my lesson. Maybe not the lesson you thought you were teaching me, but…yeah.”

Jake takes three long strides backward, then deliberately turns his back on Rumlow. He doesn’t see the sad expression on the older man’s face as Jake exits the gym, leaving him behind.


	10. D-Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake executes his plan to free the Winter Soldier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks, everyone, for your patience. It's been a hella long time between updates, but I *am* still working on it and there *will* be more whenever I can get to wifi. (My life is complicated right now, but better than last year.) Enjoy!
> 
> No spoilers for CACW, which, btw is awesome if you haven't seen it yet.

Chapter 10

For a guy who's about to die, he looks pretty good. Okay, so he’s not literally going to die, but in an hour, Jake Jensen will cease to exist.

Jake studies the reflection in his bedroom mirror. His hair is buzzed regulation-short He wears a standard-issue uniform with authentic insignia. His boots have a flawless shine. The best touch, though, is the little nametag that says his name is "Stevens". That way, if the Winter Soldier inadvertently calls him "Steve" it'll add verisimilitude to his act.

Today is D-day: He's going to walk out this door for the last time in a couple of minutes. He'll march over to the lab, where a couple of unsuspecting technicians who don't know him will have defrosted the assassin from cryo. And unless something catastrophic happens, he and the newly-christened James Finnegan will depart the lab, the base--Hydra!--forever.

The escape has been in the planning stages for months, and Jake's certain he's thought of everything. Everything is covered: Pierce, Rumlow and Hilde are anywhere from two hundred miles away (Rumlow, on a training mission with the most experienced STRIKE crew) to an ocean away (Pierce, at a security conference in Berne). Hilde, meanwhile, left yesterday to go present a paper at a West Coast seminar Jake organized for the sole purpose of getting her out of town. 

Jake has carefully arranged for the Winter Soldier to be activated on the 6th, all the paperwork going through the correct channels; he's installed safeguards so that the request hasn't actually gone anywhere near Pierce, but looks like he's signed off on it--it’ll erase itself completely from the system at midnight. He's done some discrete scheduling so the guards working the main gate to the compound this week don't know him by sight. They shouldn't take any particular notice of a guy leaving with his friend. He estimates they’ll have at least a two-day head-start, and that should be enough.

Though he’s lived in this house for as long as he can remember, looking around the living room as he exits, causes no twinge of leave-taking. It’s Hilde’s place, her careful, understated decor, nothing he’s attached to. He’s got his clothes and electronics and a few small sentimental items in the trunk of the Mustang, and that’s all he needs or wants.

The duffle bag with the gear he’s acquired for the Winter Soldier swings from his shoulder. “Hide in plain sight” is the way to go, he’s decided. He’s got normal clothes for the guy, civilian casual; they’ll drive away looking like they’re off-duty and headed out for a good time. Meanwhile, the cryo-pod will go back into storage, empty except for the transponder from Jim’s arm, and hopefully the empty container won’t be noticed for months. With luck, by the time the powers-that-be discover their assassin is missing, he’ll be deprogrammed and they’ll both be in the wind.

It’s a mild June day, but they’ve been having afternoon thunderstorms lately, so the windbreaker Jake has to cover his friend’s metal arm shouldn’t stand out as long as he keeps his hand in its pocket. There are fewer chances of things going wrong if they act normal than if they skulk around trying to leave in the dead of night, he’s convinced.

He makes his way carefully across the compound, keeping an eye out for anyone who may recognize him and call him out on his disguise. He’s had plenty of opportunities to work out the timing on his camera delays. Jake has so much stuff planted in the system it should qualify him for 4H. All security will see in the wake of his passing is an anonymous uniform. 

Here’s the lab...and there’s his mission, strapped into the chair with the familiar confused expression. He brightens when Jake walks in. “Steve,” he says, sounding pleased. One of the techs glances at his clipboard, then zeroes in on his badge and nods slightly.

Jake scrawls his alias on the form the tech hands him. “Dismissed,” he says to the techs. One of them actually salutes as they leave. This is going to work--but why shouldn’t it? He’s planned everything, his contingency plans have contingency plans.

“We’re getting you out of here today,” he says as soon as the door is closed. “Okay? You’re going to be free.”

“Free?” Like he has no idea what the word even means.

“No more Hydra. No more cryo. No more assassinations. You can go where you want, do what you want. Free.“

A look of wonder transforms the blank features. “Free...” he breathes.

“Show me your arm.” Jake has studied the manuals; he knows how to get the access panel open, has the locator disconnected in a few seconds, and the reservoir that pumps compliance drugs into the Winter Soldier in a few more. He closes the panel again, satisfied that he’s taken care of any Hydra-installed bugs. A fast sweep with the detection app he’s written for his phone confirms it.

Jake unfastens the restraints. “I’ve got some clothes for you to change into so you won’t stand out. While you get dressed, I’m gonna move that thing back into storage.” He drops the lo-jack and drug pump into the cryo-pod and closes it up. It’ll show as active exactly where Hydra expects to see it. “With a little luck, they won’t know you’re gone for months.” 

Hopefully, no one will connect his disappearance with that of the Winter Soldier until he’s had a chance to deprogram the former assassin. He’s laid a false trail for his own whereabouts, but he reckons Hydra will go apeshit if they realize both of them are gone.

When Jake gets back from storage, his friend is waiting, looking not-quite-at-ease in a plain white tee shirt, jeans and Chucks. “Pretty good,” he tells the guy, because being critical isn’t the way to go here, “Let’s get your hair up. I’ve got a ball cap you can hide it under.” He’s also filched one of Hilde’s hair elastics, and in a couple minutes, his friend looks much tidier.

“Let me give you a fast briefing.” ‘Briefing’ is a keyword; Jake is gratified to see Jim focus intently as he explains. “From now on, your name is James Finnegan. Here’s ID with that name.” He produces a scuffed-up wallet he’d replaced a year or so back--it’s worn, but the Virginia driver’s license is brand-new. “I had to pick a name, I hope that’s alright.”

“James...James Finnegan.”

For a split-second, Jake thinks he’s going to say James Bond, and then it occurs to him that his poor guy probably doesn’t even know who James Bond is. It isn’t like Hydra was going to thaw him out for a double-feature once in a while. For the first time, the enormity of what he’s trying to do hits him. It isn’t just a matter of getting James Finnegan out of here and breaking the conditioning Hydra has done; there’s a whole world he’s barely seen in decades. Jake has to introduce him to all that, too. 

There is no time for second thoughts. It’s way too late for that. “That’s right. If you want to call yourself Jim, or Jimmy, that’s cool, too. Those are common nicknames for James.”

James-Not-Bond is studying the contents of the wallet intently. “James Patrick Finnegan of Vienna, Virginia,” he reads, like he’s trying it on for size. He looks at the various cards--Jake has included for things like a gym membership, a sandwich shop (four punches away from a free sub), and a Starbucks gift card (only $2.86 on it, but it’s a nice touch)--and nods. “That’s a lot of money,” he says, looking at the cash Jake has supplied for verisimilitude. It’s a little over $60, not a fortune by today’s standards, but James looks impressed.

Jake quickly alters his own appearance with a few more items from the duffle bag. A sky-blue sport shirt replaces the uniform tunic, dock shoes instead of boots...the final touch is a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. He’s experimented with the transformation ahead of time; it’s too preppy for words, but it works with the pressed uniform khakis as casual wear.

He pulls out the windbreaker. “This should cover your arm. Keep your hand in your pocket and we’re good to go.”

“I like it,” says James, looking at the jacket for a moment before he slips it on. 

It fits. That had been Jake’s primary concern--finding something that would go over the tell-tale arm and span the guy’s shoulders, because seriously, the guy is built like a bull. Otherwise, it’s nothing remarkable. It’s navy blue and has the logo from an old cartoon series on the back, red and white concentric rings and a white star in the middle. Jake was never really into it, but the price was right--six bucks at Goodwill.

They’re so close. The parking lot is less than twenty yards away when they encounter a guy Jake recognizes. He looks for a name-tag, but it’s covered by the stack of manuals the guy is carrying. He was a recruit a couple classes back and knows Jake’s a trainee, so Jake’s really glad he changed out of uniform. 

“My buddy Jim.” he says casually. “We’re off to see the new Die Hard movie.” What if the guy asks why he needs a duffle bag to see a movie? Laundry, that’s it, they’re dropping some stuff at the dry cleaners on the way....

“Yeah? I saw the trailer online, it looks pretty intense.”

“I’ll let you know. Catch you later.” 

They resume progress toward the Mustang, and Jake has just exhaled when the guy says, “Hey, Jimmy!”

To Jake’s relief, James turns as smoothly as if he’s been answering to the name his whole life.

“Great jacket.”

“Thanks.” 

When James-Jim-Jimmy turns back, Jake sees a broad smile on his face. He no longer looks uncomfortable in his newly-acquired garb and there’s a slight swagger to his walk as he accompanies Jake to the car.

...


	11. Outside

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The great escape continues

Chapter 11

At a truck stop by the Interstate, Jake super-glues the Mustang’s GPS transponder inside the wheel-well of a camper with out-of-state plates. Let them track it when they figure out he’s gone. With any luck, it’ll be back in Montana by then.

His passenger is quiet, but his eyes watch the world around him with intense curiosity. From the vehicles around them to the billboards on the highway, everything is seen and cataloged. Once in a while, he’ll ask a question, but mostly, he just looks.

“We’re going to a safe house, but we need to make a couple stops first,” Jake says. “Then we’ll see what we can do about getting you deprogrammed. Sound good?”

“Then I’ll be free?”

“You’re free now, but I’m afraid you won’t stay free, if all they have to do is feed you codes to make you their puppet again.”

“I don’t want to go back, ever.” Jim says, his voice low. “Please don’t let that happen, Steve. If you can’t fix it...” He hesitates. “Kill me. I can’t live like this anymore, and I don’t want to hurt anyone else. I won’t try to stop you. Please.”

Jake feels a surge of nausea. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone, either, least of all this guy, who’s had the lousiest deal imaginable. “I’ll fix it,” he says, determined. “They are not going to get you back. I swear it.”

The Mustang is a sweet ride, but it’s way too conspicuous. Jake’s got just the place to ditch it, a housing development that went bust with just a couple model homes built. It’s been abandoned for several years, and Jake hasn’t seen anyone there in any of the several visits he’s paid it. 

Inside the garage of one of the models, a five-year old Chevy Tahoe is waiting for them, along with supplies Jake has cached. He pulls the Mustang in beside the dark brown Tahoe, transfers his modest baggage, and they drive off, leaving the sports car safely tucked away behind the garage door. He’s left the keys in it, though; in the event someone finds it and goes joy-riding, it’ll only obscure their trail some more.

Looking for a place to hide out and deprogram Jim, Jake had figured he’d need an out-of-the-way location. He didn’t want to leave a paper trail, so that meant finding someplace abandoned. Searching property records in surrounding states for property records of secluded cabins cross-checked with death records and delinquent taxes yielded a place up in the Pennsylvania hills in that fits the bill, and that’s where they’re headed. Jake’s only seen it on satellite feed, but he’s excited. They’ve made it this far; their adventure has just begun.

The Tahoe is loaded with camping gear. Jake’s acquired air mattresses, sleeping bags, cook-stove, fishing tackle, tent (just in case) and a variety of tools. He doesn’t want to have to live on canned goods, so they stop at a supermarket that’s not obviously on the route to the cabin. 

Jim looks around, astounded. This isn’t really a big market, as grocery stores go. The poor guy would probably lose his mind at Walmart. It would be funny, if it wasn’t so damn tragic. One way or another, he’s going to make sure Jim gets to have a new life as a free man.

While Jake’s getting one of the stock clerks to see if they have any more shelf-stable milk than what’s on the aisle, Jim disappears from his side. 

Don’t panic, he tells himself. He probably went to find a restroom. Or he’s looking at the magazine rack. He wouldn’t just make tracks--would he?

The distinctive windbreaker turns up in Produce. Jim has gotten a shopping cart of his own, showing initiative, which is great, and he’s busily loading it with an assortment of veggies and fruit. Okay, good. He’s safe, and considering how long it’s probably been since he’s been able to choose what he ate, Jake decides to leave him to it.

Jim has gotten about four times the groceries Jake has, but he resolutely doesn’t say anything. There’s an enormous bag of potatoes, but those shouldn’t go bad, and they can roast them in their cooking fire. Oranges...celery.... He has no idea if there’s even a working fridge at the cabin, but they’ll just have to eat the most perishable stuff first.

They are well and truly off the beaten track. From the highway, they travel sixteen miles along a two-lane secondary road, two more along an unpaved road, finally (after three passes to find it), turning down a narrow rutted driveway that goes on for seven-tenths of a mile to the small, square-ish cabin. This isn’t the cozy, picturesque kind of cabin; it’s one big room with a fireplace on one side and a pot-bellied stove that’s straight out of The Waltons or somesuch shit on the other. There’s a raised platform with mattresses that somethings been nesting in. It’s all plain and functional There are things like pots and pans and old mismatched dishes near the stove, and there’s no electricity at all, much less a fridge. 

Jake has solar cells to charge the electronics with in a pinch, but he’d counted on being able to pirate electricity for lights. This is a little more back-to-nature than he’d counted on--it would be fine if they were roughing it for a weekend, but for the whole summer? Well, it least it is summer and not the middle of freaking winter.

Jim discovers the root cellar behind the cabin and brings it to his attention like he’s giving Jake a gift. This is what people used before real refrigeration; with a little luck, that and the ice chests with keep the perishables from perishing until they can use them. Jim’s already hauling stuff out there. He can’t get over what a difference a few hours has made. This morning, Jim was the same blank-faced creature Jake has always seen. Now, he’s inhabiting his own mind, thinking and problem-solving; you can see it: the lights are on and someone’s home. 

Getting everything squared away takes the rest of the day. Jake is wrung out; he didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, he’s been on a tightrope all day, and he’s ready to settle for a peanut butter sandwich and call it a night. 

“I’ll get dinner,” Jim volunteers. More power to him. Jake isn’t up to coping with the ancient stove. He just nods and stretches out on one of the air mattresses. The operating manual for the Winter Soldier warns of withdrawal symptoms if the meds are abruptly discontinued, but not how severe they’ll be or how long before they surface. Probably he’ll have a rotten headache tomorrow and not be up to much for the next few days. There’s no use starting deprogramming until Jim’s dried out....

When Jim shakes him awake, the cabin is perfumed with steak and onions. It smells fantastic. He’s nonplussed to see that Jim’s only cooked one of the steaks--and divided it in half. 

“Where’s the other one?” he asks, looking at the two stoneware plates on the rough table. It’s a decent portion, and it’s accompanied by fried onions and potatoes, but not what he expected..

Jim tilts his head and looks curiously at him, like he’s not sure if Jake’s serious or not. “You’re kidding me. That’s big enough for a family of four,” he says, matter-of-factly. “We can have the other one tomorrow or the day after.” He isn’t joking.

It makes sense, Jake supposes as he digs into dinner. If Jim was old enough to fight in World War II, then he was around during the Depression. He’s not used to the kind of abundance Jake’s grown up taking for granted, but it’s okay. It’ll stretch their resources. 

Jake remembered to get steak sauce, but it’s Jim who thought of onions, salt and pepper. Hunger may be the best spice, but Jake’s pretty sure this would be an amazing dinner even if he wasn’t starving. The meat is perfectly tender and just the right degree of juicy pink doneness. He consumes every scrap, sops up the residue on the plate with a warm buttered store-bought roll and just sits there, tired, well-fed and happy. What the hell, the rest of the beef is on ice in a cooler in the root cellar; it should last a couple more days.

“Go to bed, Steve,” says Jim easily. “I’ll pick up and be along in a little while.” 

He’s a good-looking guy when he smiles, Jake thinks He could develop feelings for him, if Jim hadn’t defaulted to something like a big brother all of a sudden. Just as well. They’re supposed to be brothers, although these days, the same last name could as easily mean married. No. Chalk it up to wrong place, wrong time.

This time, he crawls into his sleeping bag. He’s aware of the sounds of Jim moving around the kitchen area, then sleep creeps over him. His breathing grows deeper, and presently, he begins to snore.

He doesn’t hear Jim cross the cabin and open the front door. He doesn’t know his companion has left the building, or that he’s out there for a long time, savoring the cool night air, the rustling branches of the trees, the gentle moonlight. Jake may have an agenda for breaking the programming instilled in him, but regardless of that, Jim knows he’s already a free man.

==============================


	12. Winter's Chill

Chapter 12

In the morning, Jim is lethargic. He goes through the motions of cooking for them, but ends up pushing most of his scrambled eggs and bacon across the table to Jake. Unlike his energetic exertions yesterday, today he’s moving with obvious effort, and he stumbles on the threshold. It doesn’t take long to figure out why he’s out of it; daylight shows spots of feverish color on his cheeks. 

“Go back to bed, Jim,” Jake says, role-reversal. 

Jim doesn’t argue. He flops down on the air mattress, covers himself with the sleeping bag, and shortly, he’s snoring. 

After a little fidgeting, Jake leaves a note on the table and goes off to explore. He wants to get a feel for the terrain around their hideout, and while he’s at it, see what he can find in the way of firewood. The woodpile to the side of the cabin wasn’t fully stocked by the previous occupant; the fireplace had been prepped, and they had enough to get them through a week, maybe, but if they’re going to be here for months, he needs to get busy.

The land slopes downward on the far side of the clearing in front of the cabin. He slides down the embankment carefully. There’s the river that showed up on the aerial views...he has fishing gear, figuring that fish is free protein. He tries not to think about the fishing trips he used to take with Brock. That part of his life is over.

A ramshackle dock juts out into the water, shaded at the moment, facing mountains to the west. The river is fairly wide here, with a rocky outcropping in the middle. They can swim out there easy enough. Beyond the river, more tree-lined slopes card the fluffy clouds.

Heading upstream, Jake’s pleased to see there aren’t any near neighbors. The nearest one that showed on the maps was miles away, so apparently that’s still accurate. He’s pretty sure he and Jim won’t be disturbed. He notes several wind-fallen trees on his way back to the cabin. They can harvest those. In addition to what they use for their fires, he’d like to leave the place stocked. Who knows, they may need to come back someday. If they do, it’ll be ready.

When he gets back to the cabin, the sun is overhead. Midday, he thinks, not feeling the urge to pull out his phone and check. An hour one way or another, it doesn’t really matter.... After seventeen-plus years of structure and classes and everyone’s high expectations for him, the sense of release is mind-blowing. In a real way, he’s needed liberation as much as Jim. Neither one of them wants to do what Hydra has planned for them. 

That’s something to think about, and to talk over with Jim, when he feels up to it. They can drag their chairs out onto the porch and watch the sun set over the far mountains and talk about what to do about Hydra. Back when he thought they were just privatized military security, Jake would have shrugged and said “Whatever, just leave me out of it.”. But the fact that they brainwash people and furnish assassinations? Oh hell no. That’s not right. 

He’s thinking about that and lunch, and getting starting on the woodpile, when he enters the cabin. Those thoughts flee at the sight of Jim thrashing amid the folds of sleeping bag. He’s muttering in several languages, begging someone named Bruno not to hurt him. He curses someone named Zola. His breath comes in terrible gasps, half-sob, half-wheeze. 

Oh god. Jake digs out the over-the-counter remedies he brought, calling himself an idiot for blithely disregarding the warnings about cutting off the drugs they’d dosed the Winter Soldier with. He isn’t sure if the guy is having convulsions, but for damn sure more serious than a headache.

Jim doesn’t seem to recognize him, and he doesn’t want to take the acetaminophen Jake has for him. It may not even do that much good, but the only way to find out is for him to take them. There’s one thing Jake hasn’t tried. He doesn’t want to while the guy is so out of it, really he doesn’t, but it’s the only thing he can think of that might, possibly work.

He recites the code string that’s supposed to gain the Winter Soldier’s immediate cooperation. It’s gibberish, ten apparently random words and numbers in Russian, but he has to admit, the chance of anyone uttering them all in chance conversation is about six billion to one. As soon as he utters the final syllable, Jim sits straight up, gaze fixed on his face. “Ready to comply,” he says tonelessly.

The hair on the nape of Jake’s neck prickles. The transformation in his friend is the scariest thing he’s ever seen. Before yesterday, Jim had always seemed pathetic, a sad guy picked on by Hydra. Yesterday seemed to bear that out as he relaxed and showed signs of having a real personality. But this? This is the person who carried out all of those assassinations covered in his file. If he uses a knife, it isn’t to chop onions and potatoes.

“Here,” Jake says. “Take the pills. Drink the water.” Jim does so without question, and just stares at him. Waiting for more orders, no doubt. “Go back to bed and rest. You need to be healthy.”

Jim reclines, arms at his sides, rigid, eyes still wide open.

“Searching, forlorn, twelve, daffodil, fortnight, one, consequence, eight, reunion, cradle,” Jake says in Russian, the command to stand down, and Jim’s eyes sag shut. He makes a little noise, almost a whimper. 

Jake feels a savage thrust of guilt at manipulating his friend with those commands, but what else could he do? That was the only way to get through his fevered delirium. And now...he knows. He finally understands Jim’s plea to be put down, and he resigns himself to the possibility. He can’t let the Winter Soldier loose on the world.

The fire has gone out. Like an automaton, Jake clears away the ashes and prepares a fresh pyre of wood, bringing in enough of the old woodpile to get by until the next morning. 

It isn’t Jim’s fault, he keeps telling himself. What he’s done, who he’s been, it’s what’s been done to him. The guy who came out here, curious and resourceful, that’s who is really is when he isn’t being controlled. That’s why breaking that conditioning is absolutely vital, so that guy has a chance to life the rest of his life as a free man.

The luster has gone from the day. Jake keeps busy, squaring away the gear they brought in yesterday from the Tahoe. There are shelves and racks to stow it on. Fishing tackle, foul-weather ponchos...too bad they don’t have a boat.

Who is he kidding? This isn’t a long summer vacation, this is life and death. They aren’t floating down the Mississippi on a raft, and if Hydra catches them...he shudders, standing with his rod and reel in hand. They’re liable to do to him what they’ve done to Jim, he thinks, chilled. Program him and turn him loose when they need murder done. 

Programming...he knows how to write code for machines, no problem. Jake’s already planning to hack Hydra. Overwriting that damned manual with bogus codes should be a piece of cake. He’s got some ideas about how to unravel what’s been planted in Jim, but now he’s thinking about insurance. What if he adds a new command? Something that Hydra won’t know, that will work for Jake even after he’s dug the old commands out of Jim’s head, a fail-safe? 

When it’s time for more acetaminophen, Jake uses the compliance code again, and once Jim’s swallowed the pills and drunk down the water, Jake carefully explains the new instructions and the code that will trigger it. Although he’s still feverish, Jim seems to understand. This time, when Jake tells him to stand down, he curls up on his side and is asleep almost at once.

When Jake’s getting ready to turn in, he gives Jim one last round of pills and water and reviews the prior instructions to make sure he’s retained it. Then he zips the two sleeping bags together, figuring it’ll help keep Jim warm, because he’s still shivering.

Jake awakens in the middle of the night. Jim’s right arm is around his waist, hand on his crotch, and this is totally embarrassing: Jake’s being humped. “Steve, oh god, Steve,” Jim keeps moaning as he thrusts against him. He murmurs endearments in a blend of English and Russian, mouth close to Jake’s ear, nuzzling the back of his neck.

The sensation is exciting. It reminds him of wrestling with Gentry, working up the nerve to go all the way. His cock responds to Jim’s fondling, it feels good--at the same time, he knows this shouldn’t be happening. He wants it to happen anyway, the heat of Jim’s hand stroking him, the rasping breath against his shoulder.... 

Is it wrong? It’s probably been a long time since Jim’s felt any kind of pleasure, and neither has Jake. For a young guy who’s isn’t even eighteen yet, he feels like he’s done nothing but be selfless and mature. Just this once, he wants to be selfish and feel good. He’s tempted to work his pants off and left Jim have his way, but that would be crossing a line. Besides: No lube.  
_Come on,_ Jake finally tells himself. _It’s not like you’re a blushing virgin. Take care of the guy so we can both get some sleep._ He reaches back and begins to caress Jim through his pants, curling his hand around the hard length straining toward him. It works; soon they’ve got a rhythm going and Jake can’t help getting into it. Being touched by someone else does that to him. Jim’s hand moves in time with the tempo of Jake’s hips, synced to Jim’s own pace.

Jake lets himself enjoy it. Being pleasured feels good, and it’s been so long since he’s had a partner. The stimulation finally reaches a crescendo; he moans and climaxes, and as if that was a signal, Jim spurts against Jake’s hand and relaxes with a sigh of relief. He presses a gentle kiss against Jake’s neck, and in a voice thick with sleep, murmurs, “I love you, Stevie.”

Jake lies awake well after Jim is snoring again. The other man’s fever seems to have broken, which is good. He’s resting comfortably. It’s Jake who can’t sleep, and it isn’t just because of the dampness in his pants and against his back. 

He’s had a sort-of crush on Jim before now, he realizes. It’s just that the last couple days has intensified it. He already came to the conclusion that it’s a bad idea to add sex to the already fraught process of deprogramming; now he knows that for Jim, he’ll always be a surrogate for the long-lost Steve. This can’t, must not happen again. Tomorrow he’ll separate the sleeping bags and hope that Jim isn’t inclined to make a pass at him when he’s in his right mind.

Finally, after a long time, he sleeps.

...


	13. An Unexpected Talent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jim recovers from his illness and displays a skill that's not in his manual.

Chapter 13 

He awakens in a strange room, which is not unusual. This room, however, has white-washed plank walls and wooden beams overhead and it smells of wood smoke. Even more extraordinary, someone is stretched out beside him taking deep, slow breaths. It’s the boy, Steve. 

Sitting up, the man reviews what he can recall of the last several days. Yesterday, or was it more than one day?...he was ill; he remembers nightmares and being wracked by chills, but that seems to have passed. Before that...Steve broke him out of Hydra. They drove a long way. They bought food. Jim cooked for them. He remembers that with a particular sense of pleasure. Steve has done so much for him, it’s important for him to pull his own weight.

Sliding quietly out of bed so he won’t awaken the sleeping youth, the man newly christened Jim Finnegan exits the cabin. He doesn’t bother walking to the privy. Instead, he waters the weeds to the side of the porch at length. Through the trees, he sees the river. There’s an obvious trail beyond the clearing. It’s worth investigating, but not barefoot. Moving stealthily about the cabin, he collects the shoes Steve has given him and a towel. 

Jim makes his way down the hillside. On the dock, he strips off the stretchy pants he slept in. They stick to the perspiration dried on his skin, and he sheds them with pleasure. He lowers himself carefully into the water, wary of submerged rocks and other potential hazards. 

The water is almost cold, and it feels wonderful. Jim uses the pants to scrub himself clean. (It should improve the state of the pants as well.) He’s careful not to keep his prosthetic submerged more than he has to. It’s supposed to be water-resistant, but since there are no technicians to repair it if it develops a problem, it’s better not to take chances. 

Steve promised him freedom...this certainly answers handsomely. It’s a glorious clear morning, and here he is, enjoying the privilege of being out unsupervised. He can clean himself, and when he returns to the cabin, he can have whatever he cares to fix for breakfast. He has clothes he can wear that aren’t designed solely to help him expedite his missions. No more missions? That is the sweetest freedom of all.

He clambers back up the hill, towel wrapped around his waist, hair slicked back, smiling. Steve is still asleep. Well, why not? By the looks of the woodpile and the carefully arranged sporting goods around the room, he was busy while Jim was unwell. 

Breakfast is a bowl of corn flakes. The taste is somehow familiar, as if he’s had them a long time ago. They start out crispy, but by the bottom of the bowl, they’re mushy, still there's the same delicate sweetness. He drinks the last little bit of milk straight from the bowl, savoring it. Afterward, he indulges in an orange, relishing the texture of the sweet pulp as he grinds each juicy section between his teeth. He can’t remember the last time he enjoyed a meal so much. Last night, the steak? No, that was probably the night before last. Small wonder he’s so hungry!

Sooner or later, Steve will wake up. He’ll be hungry--remembering his willingness to consume enormous amounts of steak, it would be a good idea to have something to offer him to take the edge off, otherwise he’s liable to decimate their prime groceries.

Fortunately, whoever occupied the cabin before them left behind assorted cookware, bowls and dishes. At the market, Steve had looked askance at some of his purchases, but now Jim begins assembling ingredients without hesitation. If he has any doubt, it centers around baking in a wood-burning stove--but he’ll manage.

By the time the loaf comes out of the oven, Steve is sitting up and sniffing. “What _is_ that? It smells fantastic!” 

“Soda bread. Come have some.”

As he’d thought, the boy goes through most of the loaf. Jim gets some of it, just to see whether it came out properly, and he has to admit, considering how long it must have been since he’s done this, and the fact that it isn’t a gas range, well, it’s not bad. 

“How did you know how to do this?” Steve asks with his mouth full.

How, indeed. He isn’t even sure himself, only that the recipe, the proportions of this and that, had come to him as naturally as if they were part of his DNA. “It’s better with raisins,” he says, looking at the buttered heel of loaf he’s holding. “And a pinch of cinnamon.”’

Steve looks from the empty plate to the cast-iron stove, still hot from use. “What’s in the pot?” he wants to know.

“I'm soaking some beans. I’ll make soup later. No use wasting the heat.” For some reason, that rationale seems familiar, but as usual, he doesn’t know why. Steve just looks baffled.

“We’re going to need to cut some more wood,” the boy says, not quite a change of subject, but a good point nonetheless. “I found some fallen trees to chop up.”

It’s a good, practical thing to do, Jim admits, although he has reservations about turning the kid loose with an ax. “How old are you, Steve?” he asks.

“Eighteen,” comes the prompt answer. Not such a kid, then, or is it just that Jim’s gotten to where everyone looks ridiculously young? “Well, almost. I’m eighteen next month.” Honest. Close enough. Considering how well he’s performed already, Jim grants him adult status.

“I guess you’re old enough to be responsible with an ax. I wasn’t sure. I remember...I think I remember you as much younger and skinnier.”

“I was about ten the first time we talked. I was hanging around the labs, and you were just sitting there looking lost. You showed me your arm, and I gave you water.”

Steve looks so hopeful...Jim doesn’t want to disappoint him, but he doesn’t remember, not really. Only that Steve used to be a runty little kid who wheezed when he got excited. “And now you’re all grown up,” Jim says lightly. The young man smiles. They’re friends now, that’s what counts.

...


	14. Hoe, hoe, hoe...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's been a long summer, and their progress in deprogramming Jim has been disappointing. What's going to happen when summer is over?

By late summer, Steve is getting frustrated, Jim can tell, and it worries him.If Jim could shed Hydra's conditioning like a snake shedding its outgrown skin, he would. After seven weeks of repeated failures, they're both getting a little desperate. Steve doesn't want to spend the winter here--their activity at the supposedly vacant cabin would be noticable when the trees are bare--Jim fears that he'll run out of patience and say, "I did the best I could, you're on your own.". 

The first thing Steve tried was hypnosis and post-hypnotic suggestions. Not helpful. He'd tried having Jim repeat the code words himself, but apparently, whoever had programmed him to begin with had put in a block against uttering any of them. He chokes up, shuts down...after a moment or two, he can speak, but nothing that contains any of the forbidden words. So far, Steve is still showing a sense of humor about it, but when the leaves begin to fall, what then?

Maybe, Jim thinks, he should volunteer to stay here and let Steve depart. He knows how to live rough--there are fish in the river and game in the woods, he won't starve. When the weather warms up again, Steve can come back, and they'll try some more. 

He mentions his idea to Steve one afternoon while they're out on a run, and Steve shakes his head decisively. "No way, Jim. I didn't break you out just so you could turn into Grizzly Adams."

"Who's that?"

"Ah, it was a corny old TV show I used to watch reruns of. There was this guy in the old West who lived in the mountains and made friends with all the animals and stuff. Yeah, I'm sure you could do it--I feel sorry for any bear that tries to mess with you--but sooner or later, you're gonna want to get back to civilization. And you've got to be ready in case Hydra finds you."

The boy is right. Young man, Jim corrects himself. Either way, it's true. Yes, he could live comfortably off the land, but he'd be lonely without Steve. Eventually, he'd go looking for a connection to other people and draw attention to himself. He knows, from all the references he doesn't understand, that he's missed out on a great many things an ordinary person would know. 

It's all because he can be controlled by a handful of words that any fool with a high enough clearance can access. It's galling. 

"Tell you what," Jim says, pushing away the worrisome thoughts. "When we get back to the cabin, somebody needs to weed the vegetable garden, and the other guy has to cook dinner. Let's race. The winner gets to pick his task."

"Sure," says Steve. "Go!" And he takes off like a young jackrabbit.

Jim chuckles and pursues him. He isn't trying hard to catch up--he stays a few strides behind--simply enjoying the mechanics of the run. There are vines and rocks to leap over, branches to swerve around and duck under. They both know the terrain, the way back to their summer home. The freedom of running is intoxicating.

From time to time, Jim puts on a brief burst of speed, drawing even with Steve for a few strides. Steve accelerates, and Jim allows him to forge ahead. By the time the cabin is in sight, Steve has been running flat out for the last half-mile, and when Jim sprints past him, he has nothing left to answer the challenge with. 

Jim bounds up onto the front porch three paces ahead of Steve, who doesn't even try to jump; he comes to a stop in front of the porch, resting his elbows and forearms on the planks, head back, breathing hard. The kid is gasping for air, and his face is the color of a radish. 

"Are you okay?" He has a sudden fear that Steve's distress is more than simple shortness of breath. What if he's really in trouble? Why is he suddenly convinced that Steve has over-exerted, that Jim has pushed him past his limits and now something bad is going to happen?

"Pass me the water jug."

They keep a white plastic jug on the porch, and Jim gives it to Steve. "Be careful--don't drink too much at once."

"Yes, mother," Steve wheezes. He takes five swallows--Jim counts the rise-and-fall motion of his adam's-apple, then he tips the jug over his head. "I think I'm going to go soak my head in the river."

"Fine. When you get back, you can start cooking supper."

Steve stares at him. "You're kidding. You like to cook. And you're going to make me do it? Slave over a hot stove--and you know it's not going to turn out as good as if you were cooking."

"I won," Jim reminds him. "And I'm in the mood to do some gardening. Besides, your cooking will never improve without practice. We've got trout in the pen, I'm sure you can do something with them, and don't forget, there are tomatoes in the root cellar."

Usually, it's Steve who tends their small garden plot. They planted seedlings shortly after their arrival, and there are a variety of edibles flourishing in cultivated rows. Ripe produce goes into the root cellar, and there's never a shortage. They've also constructed a mesh corral to one side of the dock, allowing them to catch and save fish so they always have a supply of fresh protein. It isn't a bad way to live, but Jim's mind returns to the problem of conditioning.

He's nearly to the tool shed when he stops. "I won," he repeats aloud. 'One' is a trigger word--but he's just said it, because 'won' is a different word...but not, really. He pulls open the splintery wooden door, staring at the tools inside. "I need a hoe. We have _one_." 

_I said it. I said a_ bad _word._

He takes a deep breath. "Yes, we have one...but it's rusty." That's almost another word, just in a slightly different form. He tries again. "We have one, but it's...russs-ted...as hell. _Rusted as hell._ " 

Jim laughs in triumph. There's a feeling in his skull, like something is scrabbling, trying to hang on, but it's going to lose its grip on him. He's conquered two of his words, the rest will follow.

He won't tell Steve yet. Two words is an excellent start, but there's no guarantee that it's enough to break the conditioning outright. Meanwhile, it's time to weed the garden.

...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for your patience, everyone. For the last year, I was living with only the data on my phone, and while it IS possible to write and post that way (I've been doing it!), that doesn't really work for a lengthy epic like this. I'm finally in my own place, with wifi--yay!--so hopefully I can get this completed at long last.


	15. Summer's End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake always know Hydra would be looking for them. He never expected what would happen when they found them.

It's the Thursday before Labor Day when matters come to a head. Jake knows he should be working with Jim more often to break the conditioning, but he can't think of anything he hasn't already tried, and it doesn't make sense to keep repeating things that he knows are going to end in failure. Isn't that the definition of crazy--doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?

Today he's been fishing, hoping to add to the few in the corral, but they weren't biting--it's still been productive, spending hours sitting on the dock and thinking. He's made a habit of taking a notebook with him to jot down ideas--he's worked out some coding over the summer that he hopes he can turn into an app and make some money on. Besides, he enjoys the sunlight on the water, the leaves rustling in the warm breeze as the locusts whir softly. 

Coming up the trail, Jake has a foreboding that something is different--wrong. He drops his fishing pole and notebook on the porch, following the sound of Jim's voice, around back, toward the tool shed. Then he realizes two things simultaneously--the familiar voice he hears is Brock Rumlow's, and he's speaking Russian. "Homecoming, one--" He bolts toward the sound.

Jake rounds the corner to see Jim standing there looking at the intruder, as Rumlow says, "Freight-car." Horror washes over him. He's too late, he should have tried something else--though he doesn't know what--Jim has had months of freedom, but now--

Instead of uttering his intent to comply, Jim looks steadily at Rumlow and says with a little smile, "Your accent is terrible."

Brock's jaw drops. The gun in his hand starts to come up, and Jake roars like an angry bear to get his attention. Adrenalin surges through him. Jake launches himself, aiming a high kick at what should be the middle of the other man's back, hard enough to knock him flat on his face. As the older man turns, the kick connects higher than Jake intended. Rumow's head whips around, and he goes down like a sack of sand. The gun clatters to the ground.

"I think I broke his jaw," Jake says, staring down at the fallen man.

Jim bends down, feeling the base of Rumlow's skull. He shakes his head. "You broke his neck."

"What?!" He leans over, and Jim guides his hand to the spot. He can feel the skull, but there's a gap below it where there would ordinarily be a column of vertebrae and muscle.

"Look," says Jim in that too-calm voice, the one that scares Jake sometimes. "He isn't breathing. He still has neural activity, but his autonomic nervous system is offline. He'll be dead in a minute or two."

"Can't we do something?"

"No. If he was in an ER right now, and had the best doctors, there's maybe a five percent chance they could get him stabilized and put him on a ventilator. Even if they did, he'd spend the rest of his life as a head in a bed, without being able to breathe on his own or communicate."

"I'm sorry, Brock," Jake murmurs. "It wasn't personal." 

He reaches for the gun, but Jim stops him.

"He doesn't feel anything, and it's hard to make a death look accidental with bullet holes in the body." Jim stands. "I'm going to find his vehicle and make certain he came alone. That's another reason not to use that gun," he adds as he departs.

Jake looks at the body of the man who was the closest thing to a father he ever had. The memory of getting his ass handed to him hasn't faded, but under the circumstances, it's hard to hold a grudge. In this setting, other memories supplant it, memories of fishing trips and going hunting, of war games with camouflage and paintballs...he attempts to push his feelings aside, happiness and nostalgia, regret and guilt.

Instead, he frisks the dead man, being careful not to leave fingerprints on the contents of his pockets. There's a worn black leather wallet holding two hundred dollars, which he leaves, also ignoring the variety of plastic. When he encounters a photograph of the two of them on a dock, holding up strings of fish, he sighs. That, he'll keep.

There's no phone--he probably left it in the truck to charge it--but there's a small silvery device Jake isn't familiar with...it's showing a grid with a small blue light, that seems to be fairly close to his position, although if he's reading the display right, the signal should be detectable for about five miles. What the hell? It isn't the truck--Hydra doesn't know about that. Hydra hadn't low-jacked him, or the signal would be closer and they'd've been found sooner. 

With the gun in one hand and the device in the other, he follows the signal around the corner of the cabin, where the blue light goes crazy at the porch. It's his fishing pole. 

He belatedly recalls Brock gave him that one back when he was about nine. Probably at the time, bugging it was a precaution to be able to find him if he'd gotten lost on one of their expeditions.

Jake unscrews the cap on the end, and sure enough, there's a tiny bug in it, the kind that will only react to a particular frequency, so as many times as he swept their gear, he never caught it. Still, getting within the radius to find them can't have been easy. Probably Brock's been hunting for months. He's pretty sure Jim won't find any reinforcements lurking in the woods. 

Jim...Jake's mind seizes on the miracle du jour--Jim didn't react to the code words. It's been a few weeks since their last attempt at retraining, and nothing then had been any different from dozens of attempts they'd made this summer. So how on earth had he done it today?

There's a low rumble nearby, and Jake returns to the body. Jim is pulling up nearby in the familiar dark green pick-up, dustier than usual. The camper is on the back, and as Jake surmised, it's full of camping equipment. 

"Help me get him into the cab," Jim says. "I have a place in mind. Meanwhile, pack up our stuff. Take only what you think we'll really need. There's nothing to tie him," he nods toward Rumlow, "to us, so don't waste time trying to sweep this place for trace. It doesn't matter that we were here. We won't be back."

After Jim drives away on his unlovely errand, Jake gets busy. Whoever winds up owning the cabin is going to inherit some choice stuff; he grabs a minimum of gear, figuring that if Jim is truly deprogrammed, there's nothing to stop them from finding cheap motels. A shower with actual hot water after months of bathing in the river? Awesome.

Jim has been writing a lot lately in the evening, a stack of composition books beside his bed. Jake didn't ask about them, but one flips open as he's trying to slide them into a backpack, and he sees words written over and over--the trigger words. Not just the compliance list, but the commands for standing down, for attacking, for other actions that Hydra saw fit to program their assassin to do. They're written out in English and in Russian, individually and in strings, and on one page, in big block caps "YOU DON'T OWN ME ANY MORE."

Jake feels a lump in his throat. He'd given up, but Jim hadn't. The proof had been that amused comment: "Your accent is terrible."

Jim's words go into the backpack, and Jake makes sure he has his recent programming notes. Thinking of his afternoon's work, he makes a quick trip down to the dock, freeing the few fish in their underwater corral. Then he hurls the rigged fishing pole like a javelin, watching it arc up and up, then descending into the river well downstream of the dock. He throws the tracker like a rock, getting it to skip twice across the surface of the water before it sinks. "Good-bye, Brock," he says aloud. "I'm sorry it had to end like that...."

But they're still free. It could have been much, much worse. 

...


	16. Reckoning

Jake is waiting in their truck when Jim returns on foot. "I have the basic stuff," he says. "We can go wherever we want, now. You really beat it, didn't you? I panicked hen I heard what he was saying to you, but you didn't even twitch."

Jim smiles. "Did you hear the one about the pony with the sore throat?"

"Nooo...?" Jake gives him a sidelong look.

"He was a little hoarse."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"A couple weeks ago, we raced back to the cabin to decide who was going to cook dinner. I won. Remember? And I said to you, 'I won', and then I realized, 'one' was a command word." Jake nods thoughtfully. "So, I started taking that approach, twisting the words a little until I could say them outright."

"I saw where you wrote them out," Jake tells him. "That's what you were doing at night. I could see your lips moving while you were writing, but I never thought to ask you what you were doing. I never thought of writing the words."

"Neither did they, apparently." Jim looks pleased with himself. "What about you? How are you holding up?"

Jake stares down the tree-lined dirt road, wishing Jim hadn't asked. "i'm fine," he says, hoping his tone is enough to end the discussion. Jim takes his statement at face value and begins to enumerate the nuts and bolts of the body disposal.

"There's a ravine a couple miles from the cabin, at the top of a rocky trail. I made it look like the truck went over the edge with him in it. It could be a long time before he's found--probably long enough for an autopsy to decide he died of injuries from the accident."

"Maybe, maybe not. It depends on whether he was checking in on any kind of schedule. If he misses a check-in, if the truck has a transponder, if they ping his phone--it could be hours or days, maybe even a week or so, but--"

"I left the windows open," Jim tells him. "That will help with decomp."

Jake stops the truck in the middle of the road, opens his door, leans out and pukes. The thought of Brock Rumlow becoming a snack for scavengers sends a wave of grief and anger through him. _It isn't right. Never mind fair, it isn't right that Brock will never break another class of recruits, never play another game of pool in the rec hall, never go for another ride on his Harley...he might not have been a saint, but he deserved more than this._

"Steve? Maybe I should drive."

He straightens up and closes the door. "No. I'll drive. I know where we're going."

It's late when they arrive at their destination. Jake has taken a circuitous route to avoid traffic cameras--he has an app for that--and the late summer evening is softening to twilight when he parks in a wooded area a half mile from his target.

"You don't have to come in with me," he says to Jim. "I've got this."

"I don't know what you're planning, but I've got your back."

Jake hasn't spent much time at the sleek, modern house in the woods, but his lessons with Brock on infiltrations haven't been wasted. He remembers the layout and the routine...when the housekeeper departs, there will be just enough of a gap when the security system is disarmed for them to get in through the terrace doors of the master suite.

The kitchen is exactly the way he remembers it, polished wood, granite countertops, steel appliances, and a neutral throw rug between the island and the big double sink. 

Jim stands in the shadows by the breakfast nook, but Jake waits in plain sight toward the far end of the island. Bedroom slippers shuffle down the hallway, then Pierce enters the room.

"Well, this is a surprise," he says. "Welcome back, Jake." In the harsh overhead lighting, Pierce looks old. He's trying to be jovial, but it's obviously an effort. "Would you like a glass of milk?"

Jake smiles without warmth. "No, thank you." He recalls this bit of evening routine, and doesn't try to interfere as Pierce gets a glass from one of the cabinets and pours himself a nightcap. He shifts slightly, herding Pierce to stand where he wants him without being too obvious about it.

"You sent Brock after me," he says as Pierce raises the glass to his lips. "That was a mistake." The glass lowers slowly, and Pierce sets it on the countertop. Perfect.

"Of course I did, son. Your mother and I were worried about you." A pause. "He found you...where is he?"

Jake doesn't answer, just continues to look steadily at the old man, who sighs. "Well, I'm not surprised. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen."

"He was always loyal to you," Jake struggles to rein in his rage. "To the end, all he ever did was to carry out your orders. With his last breath--and that's all the thanks he gets?"

Pierce looks apprehensive for the first time, and Jake feels a surge of vindictive glee. He _should_ be afraid. Any minute now, it's going to dawn on him that Jake isn't a kid anymore, who can be enticed by shiny new toys. They've trained him for years to be their 'asset', but he isn't brainwashed, and he owns himself.

"He was the best we had, for a long time," Pierce is solemn. "He trained our most elite troops. He trained you, son--"

"Cut the crap, Alex." Jake's voice is pleasant, but the glint in his eyes is anything but. "I know all about Alamogordo."

An intake of breath. Pierce looks shocked and, finally, afraid.

"I know you're not my father. I know Hildy was nothing but an incubator. All you are is a manipulative asshole who orders assassinations and sent a good man out to die. Killing you won't balance the scales, but it's what you deserve."

Pierce is looking beyond Jake's shoulder, and his expression has ratcheted up from fear to outright terror, and Jake figures that Jim has emerged from the shadows. No matter. This one is all his.

Jake hooks Pierce's ankle out from under him, and the older man flails, the rug beneath him slipping. While he's off balance, Jake curls his hand around Pierce's head, and smashes it into the corner of the granite counter. 

_The temple is the thinnest part of the skull,_ he remembers Brock saying. At any rate, Pierce is dead by the time he hits the floor.

He glances around at the glass of milk on the counter, the wrinkled rug under Pierce's slippers, and nods approval. "How's that for a tidy accidental death?" he says to Jim. He's surprised by how calm his voice sounds. He doesn't feel calm; he's still angry. He wants to do it again and again, shattering his not-father's face to unrecognizable pulp. It may have been violent, but it was too quick, unlike Brock. 

_What were those last couple minutes like? Did he hear my apology before everything faded to black?_

Jake takes a step back, and Jim's hand comes to rest on his shoulder. "I knew him," Jim says to his surprise, looking down at the red stain spreading on the rumpled rug. "He was a bad man."

"Yes, he was." Jake feels shaky all of a sudden. Low blood sugar, not remorse, he tells himself. 

From down the hall, the front door opens and there's a series of beeps on the alarm keypad. A woman's voice calls, "Mr. Pierce? I'm sorry, I forgot my phone...."

There are two entrances to the kitchen from the hallway. As the housekeeper enters through one, they leave through the other. The housekeeper gives a shriek at the sight of her employer's body. The buzz of adrenaline restores Jake's lagging energy. He can hear the woman babbling to the 911 operator as they backtrack to the master suite and go out the same way they came in. _Didn't even have to hack the security system to get out, that's a piece of luck._

"Are you all right?" Jim asks when they get back to the truck.

Jake holds out the keys. "I'm fine. I just need something to eat. I haven't had anything since...." Since breakfast, before fishing and driving for hours and two murders...and, come to think of it, he'd heaved up the dregs of that.

"It's not an easy thing to do, to kill," Jim says, some miles later.

"Brock was an accident," Jake says, although what other outcome was there? Brock was Hydra to the core, and hadn't been about to let either of them go free. Those were his orders, orders from Pierce, who hadn't known or cared if the man was up to the task. "Pierce? I meant that."

"I could tell." Jim isn't being ironic. "You did a good job of getting him to stand exactly where you wanted him to be for your purposes. I wasn't sure what you intended until you made your move, and you didn't hesitate. Very well executed."

Jake laughs at the play on words. His breath catches, and then he sobs. He doesn't want to break down like this--he wants to be cool and grown-up and strong like Jim...but how can he be, when he's responsible for the death of his oldest friend? He remembers the files he's read on the man beside him, detailing missions he's carried out, and the files they kept on him, as they nurtured him to become a killer, like his new best friend. 

Sooner or later...it was inevitable that one of two things would happen: either he would join Hydra, or reject them. The path he's chosen for himself is not their path. He pulls himself together, scrubbing away tears with the heels of his hands.

"It's their own damn fault," he says aloud. "I am what they made me."

 

...


	18. Surprises at SHIELD

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake has his long-awaited job interview at SHIELD. To say it doesn't go the way he expected it to is an understatement....

Jake is pretty sure he can pass for twenty-five, which is what his ID proclaims him. He’s clean-shaven; after his summer in the woods, it’s great not to itch from the hair on his neck. He’s wearing the quintessential tech nerd uniform of khakis, a button-down blue shirt, striped tie, and for the interview, he’s procured a tidy corduroy blazer to layer it with. Just a little bit hipster, the blazer. 

It’s the third week in September. He’s been back in civilization for three weeks, found a place to live, gotten rid of the truck in favor of a sporty compact for commuting in…now all he needs is a job to commute _to_. Jake has his sights set on SHIELD, which is Hydra’s closest competitor in the privatized security field--although he hopes they’re not running covert assassinations as a sideline. If they are, he’s liable to say “Fuck it” and enlist. Being a fighter pilot sounds like fun. Or a SEAL--those guys rock.

Post-commuter rush, the drive to SHIELD only takes about ten minutes. He confirms his appointment with HR at the front desk, takes a seat and waits in the blue and grey reception area. 

Jake has his beautiful (bogus) resume in the classy leather folder resting on his thighs. He stops himself from jiggling his leg--don’t show any nerves! SHIELD already has a copy of said resume, of course, or he never would have gotten this far, but he’s ready in case they need another. 

He’s studied the MIT website and catalog extensively; he isn’t trying to claim any knowledge he doesn’t actually have. He knows this shit, he’d explained to Jim, who’d watched disapprovingly as he assembled the exquisite fiction. He just didn’t get that knowledge in a classroom--and it’s not like Hydra’s going to give him a reference. This comes under the heading of a necessary…not evil, really, just a worthy fib.

He’d fabricated a resume for Jim, too; Jim gave him a long look when Jake tried to go over it with him. “The Culinary Institute of America? Don’t be ridiculous, Steve. I’m not some fancy-schmancy cook.”

“You’re a terrific cook! And these days, you have to have credentials to get any kind of a decent job.”

“I’m not a master chef--on a good day, I’m a passable short-order cook. And what’s more, this cooking school business--it’s dishonest, and I won’t do it.”

Dishonest. The guy spent decades as an assassin, but he thinks exaggerating on a resume is wrong. 

“Steven Finnegan?” His escort wears an immaculately tailored charcoal grey suit with a silk tie, has a pair of gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. Nice….

He’s taken back to HR by the Suit, whose badge reads Sitwell, Jasper. He exudes an air of primness that Jake doesn’t buy for an instant. The way he moves suggests some vigorous sport in his free time--soccer or racquetball…or maybe he just likes to wrestle. 

Jasper escorts him to an office, announces, “Here’s your ten o’clock, Mr. Coulson”, and departs with a smile to Jake. 

Coulson has a folder open on his desk. Says, “Have a seat” with a distracted wave. Jake settles in to the nice leather armchair facing a battered metal desk--it looks like the kind of army surplus that some of the low-level offices in the labs at Hydra have. It doesn’t match the rest of the office, which is understated Corporate Moderne. 

Jake has seen this tactic in action often enough not to get rattled. After three minutes---he’s been counting his pulse, so it’s somewhere around there--Coulson looks up. Whatever pleasantry he was about to make catches in his throat. He stares at Jake, looks briefly over his right shoulder, looks back. 

“ _You’re_ Steven Finnegan?”

“Yes, sir. It’s a pleasure to be here.” 

The man on the other side of the desk seems to define nondescript. Dark hair, receding slightly, dark eyes in a face etched with the creases of middle-age, off-the-rack suit…but not dumb, Jake decides as the man studies him intently. He keeps looking beyond Jake, which is starting to be annoying. Has someone else come in to monitor the interview? What’s going on?

“You have a very impressive resume,” Coulson says after a moment.

“Thank you, sir. I hope some of the skills I bring will be useful to SHIELD. I’m very impressed by what I hear about your organization, particularly your new defense contract with the Leipzig Consortium. Congratulations.”

Coulson smiles, a dry little smile, and Jake can’t for the life of him imagine why. He’d Googled the information about the contract, which had been in the WSJ a week ago. It’s hardly classified. 

He asks half a dozen questions about Jake’s supposed education, various goals he has, and whether or not they’re in line with what SHIELD stands for.

Jake wishes he’d interviewed at a few places he didn’t care about before coming here to get a better idea of what a normal interview is like; he’s getting a weird vibe from Coulson, which isn’t helped by the man’s tic of looking behind Jake repeatedly. 

Enough already--Jake twists around in his seat to see what the fuck Coulson is fixated on.

The leather folder slides to the floor unnoticed as Jake jumps up. He crosses to stare at the life-sized cardboard cutout protected in a glassed in alcove--it’s obviously old--it looks like the monochromatic photos he’s seen from the early-to-mid 20th century--but the guy has Jake’s face. A few years older--he might actually _be_ twenty-five, but….

He feels dizzy just looking at the image. “Who _is_ that?” he asks Coulson.

“That, Mr. Jensen, is Captain America.”

“Wait, like the old cartoon show?”

Coulson’s face assumes the look of a man who smells something unpleasant. “I realize that your generation is raised with scant respect for history, but he was a real man, a hero who sacrificed himself to save New York from a madman’s plot in the closing days of the war.”

_That’s him. My donor. Holy fucking shit. I’ve got to hit Wikipedia. This is epic._

“You seem intrigued, Mr. Jensen.”

“It’s certainly an interesting coincidence.” Then the instant replay hits. “What did you call me?”

That obnoxious little smile is back. “Your name is Jacob Jensen. You were born in Vienna, Virginia, to Hildegarde Jensen, who listed your father as Alexander Pierce, CEO of Hydra Security Services. You’re eighteen, not twenty-five, and I suspect you’ve never been nearer to MIT than their website, which you apparently hacked to produce your exemplary transcript.”

Jake’s heart is in his shoes. “Um, I think there’s been some mistake--”

“The mistake, Mr. Jensen, comes from thinking that SHIELD doesn’t thoroughly investigate its potential employees. Go back to Hydra and tell them to stop playing games.”

He shakes his head. “It isn’t like that, Mr. Coulson. I was home-schooled, I don’t have the kind of transcript I can document.”

“Not my problem,” the other man says icily. “If you’ll just wait in here, security will escort you from the building.” He opens a door to one side of the office, which reveals a small waiting room with two armchairs facing each other over a small coffee table.

Hot with embarrassment, Jake retrieves his portfolio and takes a seat in the anteroom. What a disaster. Now what is he supposed to do? He was counting on getting into SHIELD.

The outer door opens. The man who enters doesn’t look like any security type he’s ever seen--he’s wearing jeans and a Pink Floyd tee shirt. His dark hair is spiky with product. “Are you the new guy?” 

Jake shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Do you know anything about hyper-fractal wave-form particles?”

“Opaque or oblique?”

The newcomer rubs his hands together briskly. “You’ll do. Let’s go.” 

Might as well…he’s already in trouble--at least this guy knows how to lead with something more interesting than ‘Nice resume’. 

“I’m Tony, by the way. I hope you’re brighter than the last guy they saddled me with. Silly bastard didn’t know the difference between phosphorous and fulminate of mercury. We’re still rebuilding that lab.”

Jake winces “I’ll bet.”

Tony doesn’t believe in easy intros; forty minutes later, Jake’s elbow-deep in a programming flow chart with Tony, and it’s exhilarating. Tony points out elegant refinements that he never thought of, and it’s brilliant. It dovetails so well with what he’s been trying to do that Jake’s almost breathless. 

By the time Coulson shows up with security, Jake would do anything to stay there, sharing ideas with his new friend, learning from him--there’s got to be a way.

“It’s not like that!” Jake says when Coulson tells Tony that he’s harboring a Hydra infiltrator. “I’m not a spy!”

“So, what are you?” Tony asks. He’s at least listening; Coulson just wants to haul him out of there.

“I’m adopted.” It comes out of his mouth before he even knows he’s going to say it. “I’m not related to Hildy _or_ Pierce. Do a DNA test if you don’t believe me.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that you were raised by Hydra,” says the buzzkill from HR.

“Yeah, that was a real picnic. I got lessons from every specialist in the place--Tony, come on, I haven’t been bluffing my way through what we were just doing--”

“That’s true.”

“Look, by the time they got through with my education, I was the smartest guy in the compound. They’d spend a week putting together problems for a lesson for me, and I’d have them solved in an hour. Sometimes less. Today is the first time in ages I’ve felt like I was learning something!”

“That doesn’t prove your loyalty isn’t primarily to them,” Coulson points out, and Jake throws his hands in the air.

“What will prove it to you?” He looks from one to the other. Tony looks sad; he wants to believe Jake. Coulson is having no part of it. He looks desperately at Tony. “I’m willing to work! Whatever you need! I’ll go after donuts, I’ll do all the lab grunt work! I’ll--I’ll be your bodyguard!”

One of the security guys snickers.

“No, really,” Jake says. “I’m qualified. Watch this.” With a fast spin-kick, he takes down the guy who smirked first, using him as a battering ran to knock down the biggest guard. After a summer sparring with Jim, these guys seem to be moving in slow motion. Anybody who gets up, gets knocked back down; it takes under a minute to have them all laid out on the floor of the lab, and nobody’s laid a hand on him. 

“See? Hey, what--” There’s an acrid odor, something like cat-piss and pine air freshener. He turns as he asks the question, and only then sees that Tony and Coulson are both holding gas masks over their faces. He feels woozy.

_Well, shit._


	19. The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake's job interview continues...with a little help from some truth serum.

When Jake opens his eyes again, he’s back in Coulson’s little side office. Objects have fuzzy halos, reflective surfaces flash with little rainbows. _Side effect of that gas, whatever it was._ Everything seems to be going in slow motion, except for his brain, which is alarmed and racing. That could also be a side effect, but they could easily have dosed him with something else, something to encourage him to answer their questions. 

Jake has to be very careful not to disclose anything about anything. _Wow, that’s profound, kiddo. Just don’t mention Jim, killing people, or being Captain America’s clone, and you’ll be fine._

His hands have been secured with plastic restraints. Since they’re in front of him, he isn’t too worried about that. He cocks his head at Tony, who’s sitting in the armchair across from him. It’s just the two of them. “What the hell was that shit?”

“Quick-acting anesthetic gas. A little defensive countermeasure we whipped up. How do you feel?”

“Like a two-beer buzz--with a headache--and everything is out of focus and sparkly.”

“That’ll go away. Why did you really come here, Steve--or Jake, or whatever your name is?”

“I need a job. Hydra can’t stand you guys, so I thought hey, that’s the way to go.” _Hey, look! I don’t need truth serum to tell the truth!_

“And you thought beating up our security guys was what, exactly?”

“An audition--look, I used to be tight with the guy who does recruit training for Hydra. Took lessons since I was, like, three or four. I was just a kid, and he’d pick some guy with a twenty-inch neck out of the new recruit intake, and sic him on me. I worked my way up to three or four guys at a time.”

“Uh-huh. And you think I need a bodyguard?”

“If those guys are the best you’ve got, definitely. Just…teach me. Your programming, holy crap, that’s some awesome stuff you’re doing--please?” So far, he hasn’t needed to lie, and his enthusiasm is unfeigned.

“So you can commit industrial espionage and funnel our R&D back to Hydra?”

“Hydra can go fuck itself.” Jake snarls.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

Jake has half a second to censor himself, but fortunately, that’s a broad question. “Hydra does assassinations,” he says promptly. “I hacked their system and found out about it and decided that wasn’t the kind of business I wanted to get into. I left, put together a resume and here I am. And I’d like to point out that while my resume may not be strictly true, it _is_ accurate. Maybe I didn’t learn it at MIT, but I do know everything I took credit for.”

Tony is staring at him, brown eyes wide and shocked. “Assassinations?!”

“You know, you’re super cute,” Jake is emboldened to say. “And all that brainpower of yours is really sexy. Okay, maybe you don’t swing that way, but if you do, we could have fun. When we’re not busy working, of course.”

“Hold it, hold it, back up-- _assassinations?!_ ”

Jake rattles off a half dozen of the names he got from Jim’s file. “Probably more,” he feels compelled to add. “I realized what I was looking at and back-buttoned the hell out of there.”

The fuzziness is fading, and he feels less buzzed…hopefully, that means whatever it is is wearing off, but Tony doesn’t need to know that. “So, hey, are you gay? Straight? Bi-curious?”

Tony face-palms. “I’m twice your age, literally.”

“So what?” Jake rises enough to bend over, planting his bound hands on the coffee table for balance and leans forward so he’s eye-to-eye with Tony. “That just means that you have twice as much experience.”

“Kid--”

“It’s not kid, it’s Steve. I put a lot of work in on that identity, I’ll have you know. And you can’t tell me you haven’t got some notches on your bedpost, a hot guy like you. I know I still have a lot to learn there. And in the lab….” Jake’s throat is dry. He can’t go on.

Tony says, “Oh, hell….” He scoots forward on his chair and his mouth meets Jake’s. Mmm…he tastes like blueberries, and carries a warm scent of fresh laundry and coffee. His hair looks spiky, but it’s really soft. Jake’s right hand twines in the dark fringe while his left fist acts as a support column.

When their mouths finally part, Tony edges back, looking wary. “How did you get your hands free?”

“I’m good at what I do.” His belt buckle has a discreet spring-loaded blade, perfect for sawing through plasti-cuffs. From the way Tony looks at him, he has a feeling he’s overplayed his hand. Jake explains. “When I was little, they worried that I was going to be kidnapped or taken hostage, so I had self-defense classes pretty much since I can remember…and that included getting loose from all kinds of restraints. 

“They didn’t make a big deal about it, it wasn’t like they were scaring me and saying, ‘We have enemies and you need to know this stuff because they might take you away and kill you.’…no, it was more like, fighting practice with Brock, then what we called ‘Houdini practice’. He’d showed me a documentary about Houdini, and of course, I wanted to be as cool as him, so I worked hard at rope escapes and duct tape and all that stuff….” Jake hasn’t thought about that in ages. They’d reviewed it once in a while, but as his proficiency in fighting had increased, the less Houdini practice he’d had.

Tony is nodding. “My dad was one of the founders of SHIELD,” he says. “I took some karate, but mostly, I was surrounded by bodyguards every time I left the estate. It was a sucky way to grow up. When I went off to college, I was even younger than you are, and I went wild. _That_ was fun.”

“So I guess I’m screwed, huh?” Jake sits back in his chair, looking soberly at Tony. “You guys aren’t going to hire me, and I wouldn’t put it past Mr. HR Killjoy to blacklist me with every security company in the country.”

“You know, maybe…” Tony pulls out his phone and starts tapping away. “MIT offers free online learning. It isn’t the same as taking classes--you don’t get actual credits for it--but you could prove that you know the material.”

A moment later, Jake feels his phone vibrate. Of course, they have his number from his resume, it isn’t a mind-reading act.

“We tried scanning your phone while you were passed out,” Tony admits, “but whatever security program you’ve got wouldn’t give us the time of day.”

“Thank you.” That’s damn near the bright spot of Jake’s day. “The last thing I needed was Hydra reading my little black book, so to speak.”

Tony’s eyes widen. “Wait, _you_ wrote that security encryption?!”

“A couple years ago,” Jake shrugs. 

“Okay, I’m officially impressed.” Tony rakes his fingers through his unruly hair. “Even knowing your phone number, I couldn’t crack it.”

Jake grins. Maybe he isn’t out of luck after all. Unlocking his phone, he accesses a subroutine of his camera access program. A moment later, the flat screen on the wall comes to life, showing the hallway outside lined with security with an eye on the door to their room.

“Holy shit! How did you _do_ that?”

“You show me yours, I’ll show you mine. Tech, that is, although I’m certainly up for some naked fun and games.” He beams at the older man, who looks stunned.

“Okay, the phone was one thing, but, but--you just hacked our security cameras! You’re not--you can’t just--what the fuck did you just do?!”

Jake can’t help himself--he starts to laugh. “I hacked Hydra first,” he says at last, knuckling moisture from the corners of his eyes. “I had to get to a secure terminal, so I had to figure out how to fool the cameras. This--” He waves at the display “was to make sure I wasn’t going to run into anyone in the hallways. There’s also a setting that will delay the scan on the camera to allow more time to get past it. And because I like you, I’ll give you a hint--it works a lot like a garage-door opener.

“I heard my so-called parents arguing, that’s how I found out I was adopted,” he explains. “That’s when I went looking for more information. I didn’t find out who my real parents were, but that’s how I found out about the assassinations. If you want my software, I’m happy to play let’s make a deal, and I’ll throw in anything you want to know about Hydra.”

Tony stares directly at Jake. “Why are you here, really?”

“Ever hear the saying, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’?”

They stare at each other for a moment. Tony draws a deep breath and bellows. “Coulson! Put this kid on the payroll, or I quit!”

“Mr. Stark, that’ a very bad idea.”

“I take full responsibility--and I’ll even buy you those trading cards you’ve been sighing about.”

“I will not be bribed.”

“Don’t call it a bribe. Call it…a signing bonus.”

“Very well” Coulson sighs. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Finnegan.”

 

…


End file.
